Reading and watching roundup, Hugo nominees edition
As I mentioned in my previous post, all it took to get my reading mojo back (temporarily, no doubt) was going on an extended vacation. So I continued to do work the first week, and didn't do any reading, and then the week in Bretagne I also didn't do much reading because I was busy hanging out with cafemassolit in person, but in the ~1.5 weeks outside of that, I managed to finish or read in their entirety 7 books. (Most of this was during the time in Belgium where I didn't have much else to do, and on planes, where ditto.)
I also watched a bunch of movies on planes, which I've also written up. And the Hugo Awards were over the weekend, and I have thoughts. I couldn't get everything, or even meaningful chunks to fit in a single post, so let's see how this goes. I'm prioritizing getting my thoughts on Hugo-nominated things out, and then we'll see.
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9. Cat Valente, The Past is Red -- I was at first very confused about this novella when I started seeing write-ups for it among the Hugo posts, because it sounded so familiar, but like something I had read several years ago, and then how could it be nonimated for a Hugo this year? sophia_sol's post finally made it make sense -- this novella is an expansion of an earlier novelette ("The Future is Blue"), which I must've read in an anthology at some point, possibly without realizing that it was by Cat Valente, because I remember quite liking it, and I was of the firm belief that I'd never liked anything by Cat Valente until The Refrigerator Monologues. The original novelette forms the first part of this novella (I'm not sure if Valente made any changes to it or not; there were a few parts I did not recall, but also it's been years), and I still really like it! I'm much more mixed on the new stuff; in particular, the middle section dragged for me, and while I was reading that, I was thinking that the expansion may have actually been a net negative to my enjoyment. I did eventually get to more stuff that I liked towards the end, so I do think it's a net positive, but not very strongly. Spoilers I liked the revelation of the Martian colony and its refusal to have anything to do with the Garbagetowners, I liked the reveal of who Big Red is (which I figured out just a tiny bit ahead of the on-page reveal, and then went back and reread the introduction of Big Red and enjoyed the way things about her are foreshadowed -- "she's not allowed to go outside", and a ship being neither inside nor outside (which at first sounds like it's about Tetley's boat but is actually about the colony spaceships)), and I liked most of the stuff with Mister. But in-between, there are too many places where the catvalentness of the prose overwhelms Tetley's idiosyncratic, compelling voice (note to self: "The Future is Blue" appeared in the Drowned Worlds anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan; The Past is Red is a Tor.com title, but I haven't been able to figure out the editor for it yet; I'm taking note of these things because I'm really curious to know whether the difference between a Cat Valente story that works for me and one that doesn't is editorial input, as the failure mode of her writing for me is one that I think can be corrected by an editor taking a machete to the prose. But anyway.) Despite the all-too-frequent catvalentness of the prose, there were a number of quotes I really liked:
On the trophies: "Oh, I know [the Fuckwits] were all the worst kind of death-guzzling monsters, sick and swollen as blood blisters, stupid, hungry, toothful voids [...] Imagine being so alive and conscious of the importance of every single second of constantly winnowing life, every single simplest action and choice and effort and onrushing death, that you would carefully mark out Little Lucy having fun and crown her for it like the Queen of Time. Imagine having so much energy to spare after finding food and shelter and clothing and some tiny goddamn scrap of company that you figured you'd make a beautiful silver cup, not because some kid did the best job, but just because she tried the hardest. [...] Imagine having that much left over that you give one single ghostly shit about the eighth-best daffodil." "All their mountain of golden wasteful love."
Watching "Cheers": "they kept drinking and drinking like there would never stop being enough to pour down their gorgeous slavering maws"
"All seagulls are dead-eyed psychos. If the whole Fuckwit culture was a bird, it would be a seagull. Ravenous, stupid, vicious, not a single shit given, nice feathers."
"I want to have to watch what I eat because it's so easy to get fat."
"the horrifying feeling of the girl from subscription Services suddenly denying you the right to be ignored"
13. Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built -- when I first heard that Becky Chambers was writing a book about a tea monk and a robot, I thought that sounded potentially adorable; Chambers does not always work for me, but her writing of AI characters in A Close and Common Orbit was a thing I particularly enjoyed, and I was hoping for more like that. Then the book came out and I read the reviews, and decided I wasn't even going to bother, because it now sounded like this was Chambers leaning into all of the things about her writing that DON'T work for me. Then it showed up on the Hugo ballot and the voter packet, and I figured I'd give it a shot, but got bored on page 2 and figured that was enough for me. But then I was on the 10 hour flight back home, with no new movies I wanted to watch, and it turned out that the only book on my Kindle that I had not yet read and was able to open in airplane mode was this one, so I read it after all. And, ugh, yeah, this is definitely Chambers fully embracing all the aspects of her writing that don't work for me and dispensing completely with the ones that do. I guess that's what we're doing now, and it makes me very sad, because I was genuinely enjoying the trajectory she seemed to be on as an author with Wayvarers 2 and 3, but it seems like now that she's gained recognition for cozy sci-fi, she's going to just write twee Tumblr self-care nonsense from here on out.
One of the reviews that convinced me not to bother with this book was this one by chestnut_pod (which I assume I must've gotten to via sophia_sol), and I went back to reread it after finishing. Some of the things called out didn't bother me -- I skimmed over the nature stuff and the tech stuff and the religion stuff because I found it boring -- but can see and agree with the criticisms. The thing that the linked review/rant calls out that did very much bother me was everything to do with Dex, the protagonist and POV (and the tea monk in the tea monk + robot concept pitch). Spoilers from here
I feel like the point Chambers is trying to make with Dex is that a) it's OK to not have a "purpose" in life (this is said straight out in the dialogue between Dex and Mosscap the robot, in what passes for a climax in this book, I suppose), and b) it's OK to feel unfulfilled and depressed even when objectively one has everything one needs -- a loving family, a supportive community, a career in which one helps people and is recognized for their contributions, and c) taking time for self-care is valid. I agree with all of these points in general, but the way Dex goes about embodying them, and the way the narrative reassures them (Dex is agender and uses they/them pronouns) about all this really bugged me.
So, Dex decides to change their vocation and become a tea monk, which is something that is easily done in their order. They take on this new vocation by acquiring all kinds of accoutrements of the trade but refusing to learn anything about how to do the work, saying they will learn by teaching themselves. Now, from the description of the role tea monks play in this society, they sound like therapists who serve you a cup of tea, but not only is Dex able to just... interact with the public with no training -- and it goes predictably badly when their first customer starts talking to them about her cat dying, which leads to talking about how she's drifted apart from her partner, and Dex has no idea what to do -- but very weirdly, we then get a montage of Dex learning to mix different kinds of tea and enhance the space in which the tea is served, like remedying a lack of chairs -- but it is not at all clear they they took any steps to learn what to SAY to people who come to them with their problems. Apparently the talk part of therapy requires no training, it just happens, or maybe you just need the tea. So, yeah, they magically get good at this -- becoming the best tea monk on this moon, according to their customers -- just by messing around with some herbs. (I'm kind of curious what any of the therapists on my flist would make of this book, but I'm not sure any of them are reading Chambers...)
And then when Dex needs a break from their tea monk vocation -- which is valid, they should be able to take a holiday -- they go about it in the stupidest way possible. They set off on what is essentially a wilderness hike without adequate preparation or telling anyone where they're going. In fairness, they do come to recognize that this was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do, at least, but, like. This is a person who is 29 years old, has been through two careers, one of which involved traveling on their own for two years, and a person who has been entrusted with the emotional well-being of many people -- HOW are they this dumb? Also, they bail on their professional obligations to go on this stupid quest for crickets, informing the next village that they're dealing with a personal matter. Which, like, personal emergencies come up, sure, but your existential malaise cresting is NOT an emergency, come on -- and this part is never recognized as a problem by the narrative, that I could tell.
Dex's other hangups also feel really infantile: Dex refuses to let their new robot acquaintance help them get water from a creek because there is this post-robot-emancipation abhorrence of making robots do work, and Mosscap has to point out that Dex would let a human friend offering help do them a favor and to stop being a dumbass denying it agency. Dex also feels weird about eating in front of Mosscap, who can't eat, and their solution is to put half the food on a plate for Mosscap, then demand that the very puzzled Mosscap play-act being done with the food, which makes Dex feel better about it because Reasons, I guess. There was something about this sort of unquestioning assumption that stuff would work out in their favor no matter how idiotically they go about things to prioritize their needs and soothe their ego, and that others should do stuff to conform to their cultural expectations that both really annoyed me and also I think contributed to me constantly catching myself thinking of Dex as "he" instead of "they" -- for all that they are agender, Dex felt like a real manchild of a character. (After I watched the Hugo ceremony, I need to add: in the acceptance speech, Chambers talks about how Dex resonates with people who are feeling tired, burned out, etc., and how they feel this book is giving them permission to rest, to take care of themselves. And, like, rest is good, taking care of yourself is good -- but there are constructive ways to go about it, and then there's what Dex does. As far as I could tell, Dex sets their own schedule, so they could have just, like, built in a couple of weeks of vacation, let alone time to go to a different tea monk and have a damn cup of tea. It sure doesn't seem to be concern for the people on their circuit that's stopping them, and I'm not sure what the economic setup on this moon is, but it doesn't seem like it's economic pressure that's preventing Dex from taking a break -- after all, they seemed to have no trouble parking their wagon for a couple of months while they taught themselves tea-making. So it's basically just their own hang-ups preventing them from making a more reasonable schedule, until the situation comes to a head and they bail on their responsibilities with no transition. I suppose that *is* relatable for some people, but I just find it really annoying.)
I did like Mosscap the robot OK, and the little bits we get to hear about the wild-built robots, now five generations removed from the original robots that walked out of the human factories 200 years ago, but Mosscap also very clearly exists as a guide to resolve Dex's first world problems, rather than a character with its own arc or drive.
This book further eschews any plot or even vague gestures towards one -- it's all domesticity and Tumblry conversation, framed by Dex's stupid decisions.
So, yeah, not a book that I liked. And unlike the other Becky Chambers books I found more frustrating the enjoyable (Wayfarers 1 and 4), not a book I see much redeeming value in.
10. P. Djeli Clark, A Master of Djinn -- This is a book I started several months ago, once I caught up on the short fiction set in this universe, and as part of a planned informal sync read with cafemassolit (and also because I was going to have a one-off train commute for the first time in 2 years), but then K finished it way ahead of me and I wandered off, and only came back to it once I was on vacation and was also trying to finish as many Hugo things as possible before the results came out. And I liked it, and enjoyed the read, but basically in the same way I've enjoyed all of Clark's other work: really liked the vivid, original setting, had the prose go down easy, but while I had fun meeting these characters (or seeing them again, for the returning ones), I don't feel deeply engaged by them, and the plot remains a relative weakness (but the plot thing did not bother me to any greater degree than in the shorter fiction, which was a thing I was a little nervous about with this novel-length debut).
I still really like the magical Cairo setting, but don't know that the novel expanded my appreciation of it to a significant degree. SPOILERS from here The half-Djinn thing offers some intriguing possibilities, but the stuff with the Nine Lords and the Seal I was eh on -- what I love about this setting is how urban it feels, so the high-fantasy elements like that are not what I'm here for. I do appreciate the glimpse of what is happening in other parts of the world in reaction to this magical reality -- Germany and Russia starting to look into integrating or at least interacting with their own magical denizens, England debating whether to try to get control of the magic of their colonies or reject it as barbaric in favor of scientific progress (as personified by the views of the Worthington siblings). I mean, I'm happy to keep reading Cairo magical police procedurals, but it's nice to see that broader look. The thing I did appreciate about the worldbuilding expansion is that the novel length allowed for a more nuanced look at this magical Cairo, and an exploration that, liberated as it is, there are internal problems and prejudices (ethnic and colorist and classist and religious), and even the good guys have blindspots (e.g. Fatma originally dismissing Hadia). I do feel like the solutions the book shows are too simplistic -- really, the neighbors who were trashing the "idolaters'" stores last week are now helping rebuild them, as soon as the voice preaching division is gone? -- but fine, Clark needed a way to (heh) put the genie back in the bottle, I get it.
Character-wise, I actually don't find Fatma or Siti super interesting, but Fatma is a fine police procedural protagonist and Siti is a fun love interest (and gets some great dialogue, both sultry and fighty), so they aren't problems, just not sources of particular enjoyment for me in this world. Onsi had been my favorite going in, so I enjoyed seeing a bit of him. My surprising favorite in this book was Ahmad/Sobek, whose creepy lurking and general comic relief was a highlight for me in every scene he was in; I was thus pleasantly surprised that he got to play such a pivotal role in the climax and the denouement. The other character I like a lot is Hadia, Fatma's new partner. When cafemassolit and I were talking about this book (after she finished and I hadn't), and K pointed out that Fatma is kind of a Not Like Other Girls protagonist, which makes her a bit outdated as a protagonist for such a progressive book, and, yeah, I generally agree -- like, the thing that makes her unusual is that she is a POC queer woman, which is great, but from a personality perspective, she's a SFF mystery lead played pretty straight, and so less interesting than the others who surround her. Hadia makes for a really nice foil -- this Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff hardworking nerd who likes paperwork to Fatma's swagger -- and was also just a fun character, with her unexpected skills and numerous cousins she leverages. She also fills in a hole that was kind of weirdly left in the fabric of the series cast, of a devout Muslim woman, who wears a hijab and makes time for prayer, but it definitely did not feel tokenistic. Anyway, Hadia is great, looking forward to her continued partnership with Fatma and hanging out with felow nerd Onsi.
The plot is, well. First, "the impostor has something that is controlling the Djinn/overriding their self-control" was so clear to me from the point when the librarian attacked them that it actually took me a while to realize that Fatma et al had not figured that out -- not even when Siti turned on her suddenly, that Siti actually had to explain to her she was being mind-controlled. Which, you know, does not speak well to the perspicacity of your brilliant investigator lead/the overall magical police force, but whatever. Similarly, I was pretty sure that the "AW" in Siwa's notes had to be Abigail and not her red herring brother, from about the second or thrid time that the initials were mentioned (the continued mention of Abbie's bandaged hand was quite effective at foreshadowing that; maybe too effective), and see above for the effect of how long it took Fatma et al to figure it out -- complete with the forensic magic revealing the lock of hair she expected to see, not the one that was actually there (neat idea in theory, but the execution didn't work for me very well, maybe because I was very ready for them to finally figure out what was going on). I do like the identity of the antagonit, though -- both that it's also a woman, who forges this as a path because a traditional path to power isn't open to her, and especially that everyone overlooks her as a possibiity because she uses their biases to hide, presenting herself as a weak, silly Englishwoman, who faints at the least provocation and speaks basic Arabic very badly but earnestly after years in Egypt.
Speaking of Abbie, it was interesting to me (and honestly, kind of refreshing, after a bunch of Tumblr-woke books in which everyone on the side of the good guys is very careful to do only the 21st century enlightened liberal acceptable things) that Siti's solution to dealing with Abbie before she is able to summon the Nine Lords is assassination, and that Fatma, after being initially taken aback, agrees to it as the most expedient solution. And then the way the pacifist ifrit deals with Abbie -- rendering her catatonic and erasing her whole self, which is pretty horrifying and I think worse than killing her would have been -- Fatma has a problem with that, too, but Siti does not. Which, it's partly explained as "the Djinn have their own concept of justice", but it's still really interesting to see a fairly fundamental disagreement in what is morally acceptable between two allies/two people in a relationship.
Random bits: I liked the bookseller couple, and was also amused by the jokes of the djinn who is the liason between the angels and Fatma and Hadia. The thing with the basket of severed tongues was very memorably gruesome (which I mean as a compliment, in case that wasn't clear).
11. Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars -- another book I started months ago, but only finished on the eve of the Hugo awards. I saw Ryka Aoki on a virtual panel somewhere -- I think a Tor.com event -- and found her funny and kind of scarily accomplished in a polymath sort of way, which immediately made me want to check out her new book. I was among the first set of people to get a copy when the library's orders came in, and then I proceeded to read the first 10% or so and squat on it until my renewals ran out (and then some), before finally returning it when I got a digital copy with the Hugo voter packet. And, hm. I've seen a lot of rave reviews for this book on my flist, as poignant and wildly original; I've also seen people write that it did not work for them at all -- and I can see both of those, actually, and am kind of in the middle myself (which is disappointing, because I wanted to be swept away/discover a new favorite author). The thing is, I liked and was moved deeply by some parts of this book -- but none of those things have anything to do with the speculative aspects of this book, which by and large did not work for me.
I found everything to do with Katrina's transness really powerful and affecting, in a way that I don't remember feeling with any other trans protagonist narratives I've read. I think part of it is that it doesn't flinch from the brutal parts of Katrina's history -- it is definitely a very different set of problems than the very white collar, privileged world of The Unpopular Vote, including CW for all the things self-loathing, suicidal thoughts, abuse from her family and the queer community she counted on for support (including Evan raping her), sex work (presented in an impressively non-judgemental way). The other reason, I think, is down to the intersection of Katrina's identity as a violinist and as a trans girl -- it is so specific to her, from the way Shizuka realizes she follows and predicts when it comes to mastering the violin, to the complicated feelings where Katrina hates her large hands, which she thinks are ugly, but where the larger span makes it easier for her to master difficult pieces, the violin as her voice because she can't trust her actual voice not to betray her, and, of course, the way her personality and her pain power her music ("Her tonality had been honed by a lifetime of being concerned with her voice. Her fingerings were liquid, born of years of not wanting her hands to make ugly motions. And her ability to play to a crowd, project emotion, follow physical cues? Katrina had trained in that most of all.") I was also impressed that Katrina being seen as a "trans activist" (first, and violinist second) is a ploy of Hell/the people looking to hurt Katrina -- because once it comes out that Katrina is trans, even the people on her side, the ones defending her from the awful trolls, are no longer talking about the music. (And this is only tangentially related to the rest of the paragraph, but I wanted to mention it somewhere: I also appreciated the point that people aren't all good or all bad, the "too many sections" conversation between Shizuka and Lan. And on yet a third one, this quote really struck me: "Some of the girl's stories seemed unfathomably cruel. Some of them sounded like being a teenager" -- and I do think that blend, that balance is a lot of what makes Katrina such an easy-to-follow protagonist, such an effective POV character.
A large part of this book after Shizuka Satomi becomes Katrina's violin teacher is kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy where powerful people are very nice to a young person who has survived abuse and general shittiness and give them everything they want -- it reminded me of The Goblin Emperor in that regard, only even more so, because spoilers from here Shizuka is so very powerful -- she has the money to give Katrina any material things she wants, from nice clothes to a souped up violin, and she has access to sci-fi technology through Lan, and apparently also arcane powers, like making a nasty violin shop proprietor die of a heart attack after being mean to Katrina and have the house of the MC who screwed up Katrina's first public performance burn down. The latter part went a bit too far IMO, but I do think that it's interesting that Shizuka is definitely not a nice person, she's just a ruthless and powerful person in Katrina's corner, and I certainly don't begrudge Katrina the wish-fulfillment, certainly not when the world is still really stacked against her. I also thought it was interesting that a magical -- well, science fictional -- transition option is presented to Katrina by Shirley, and she considers it and leaves it as an option for later, but prioritizes being able to play at the competition (in her current body that has done all the work) over the immediate magical solution. And Katrina's response to Shirley's offer to "make [her] a girl" -- "Besides, I'm already a girl" -- felt both hopeful and triumphant in this context.
I also found everything to do with music really powerful, which is definitely entirely to the narrative's credit, since I know nothing about playing music, and was mostly unfamiliar with the pieces being talked about, including the Bartok, but when the book describes it as "what does a dying genius say, in his last final word, with a voice that is not his own" (witing a piece for violin when he was a pianist), stuff like that really got me anyway. The author, and the POV characters who do care about music, really sold me on the importance of it both to themselves and to humanity (well, intelligent life in general, by the end). The true climax of the book, which is Katrina performing the Bartok piece, the narrative going through it movement by movement, really worked for me, and that's pretty impressive, I think. And ditto for violin as a physical object, in Lucy Matia's thread; I know even less about what a luthier does, but all of those descriptions worked powerfully for me as well. And the echoes of other women in the music -- the Amati daughter from whom Lucy Matia takes her line, the nameless Chinese carpenter who made Aubergine. And I really liked that there was a brief scene where Tamiko, who seemed to be initially set up as a rival for Katrina, fragile, troubled Tamiko in the crosshairs of Hell, speaks up for Katrina at the performance: "She's a girl, you dipshit! [...] Shut up. Can we just hear her play?"
I knew about the trans protagonist and about the violin stuff from the cover blurb; the thing I totally did not expect to find as powerful as I did was everything about the food and the sense of neighborhood, and the way those two things intersect and almost stand in for/represent each other, the way they layer and evolve -- Astrid's fusion of Asian and European, Hainan chicken at Caputo's Pizza, and even Lan going into paroxysms over Olive Garden (which I'm unironically fond of and kind of miss). Even the demon is weirdly humanized through his consumption of food.
Of course, the whole Starrgate Donut storyline is at the center of the food-and-neighborhood focus, and that part of it worked well for me -- Aunty Floresta and Edwin exploring the local eateries and what makes them special and bringing the abstract essences of that back to learn to make proper donuts, which cannot be simply replicated -- with the addition of some sci-fi tools, like "reduced gravity in the proofing box for added fluffiness" and microsecond laser bursts in the oven to give "cake donuts the perfect crunch around the edges" and "a lattice of nanoperforations that len in just the right amount of coffee"; this was the only sci-fi element which worked for me in this book. The rest of the sci-fi stuff just felt... weirdly shallow next to the depth with which Katrina's storyline and the musical aspects were explored. Lan, Shirley, Markus, and the twins did not feel like full-fledged characters. Shirley's personhood was not deeply enough explored to be at all interesting to me. The whole thing with the Endplague and the stargate did not resonate with me at all, and the stargate as the get-out-of-jail-free solution to Shizuka's Faustian bargain did not feel satisfying to me in the least (I also did not really buy Shizuka and Lan's romance, because, see above, Lan never felt like a real character). And I kept feeling like the "refugees settling in to make a new life for themselves" aspects that this was supposed to play on would've worked better for me if they were not science fictional refugees. There are some pretty fun lines to come out of this part of the story (like, "We have a donut to calibrate" and "rotate the reference donuts"), but on the whole the SF sections threw me out of the book.
I found the fantasy aspects of this book pretty shallow too -- Shizuka's Faustian bargain and the frog-like demon dude -- but this bothered me less, for whatever reason. Maybe I'm more willing to accept this level of absurdity in a "demon wandering around a modern urban landscape" than I am with sci-fi. I still don't feel like the fantasy elements really enhanced the story to any significant degree, but at least they did not interfere with my enjoyment of the book.
Also, while I'm tallying up the negatives, for a book that had such a multifaceted exploration of women, where even firmly secondary characters like Astrid got to have more than one dimension (she is not just a kindly housekeeper but also a gifted piano player and music teacher in her own right), the male characters, well, let's say they don't get that same level of attention. They are either just there to be awful (e.g. Katrina's father, Evan, her johns, the bank CEO, the literal demon), especially by contrast to a positive female character (e.g. Helvar vs Lucy Matia), or in a strictly supporting role (Lucy's son Andrew, Edwin, who's a little kid). Which, like, it's fine, there are a lot of ways in which the tertiary characters in this book are just archetypes/functions, and those don't necessarily have to be nuanced -- but where it bothered me was with Markus, who actually gets a POV, but the only resolution of that POV seems to be... toxic masculinity, I guess? Where he rejects his mother's sacrifice to get her family to a safe place and wants to go back to fight beside his father in a poinltess galactic war, and murders two people over an insult/rejection of him -- and does not get to LEARN anything or come back from that, but is placed in stasis and will be shipped back to the Empire. Which, for a book that seems quite interested in the possibility of redemption (e.g. with Shizuka) was just weird to me. Now, Shizuka's victims chose the cursed bow (whether she, like, groomed them into it or not is not a question one can answer, I suppose); it is certainly not the same as what Markus did, but it's still a weird dichotomy to me.
Back on the positives, I was really amused by the random Asian/Asian diaspora bits that pop up here and there: All the pomp and red and gold of the "BiennialXinhua Phoenix Investment Bank Golden Friendship Violin Competition" (as well as just that name, and the "Golden Rainbow Diversity Tour") and hte prize of $888,888 dollars. The Asian-American mother saying "Not to be racist, but I wish the Chinese would stay out of our music"; "Grandma Lieu, whose family owned a Mercedes and a Lexus, was collecting empty cans". And "No matter where you live, if you have an Asian friend who can set you up with free Wi-Fi, you go with it and don't ask questions" :)
So, I'm left with complicated feelings about this one. The parts I liked were very strong, and I'm glad I got to experience them; I would happily read more by Ryka Aoki writing about music, food, place, and trans characters. But I don't think it worked for me as speculative fiction almost at all, which was NOT a failure mode I'd expected of a Hugo-nominated novel...
12. Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun -- plot twist: I did not start reading this book months ago and finish it in time for the Hugos. I did check this book out of the library several months ago, multiple times, juggling several Lucky Day copies (which cannot be renewed), until tabacoychanel took pity on me and furnished me with my own copy. I'd heard really good things about this one and wanted to give it proper attention, which finally happened at the tail end of my vacation, when I started and finished the book in a couple of days. And was really impressed! I don't know if it's my favorite out of the Hugo novel crop I read this year (which ended up being 5 out of 6 by the end), but I do think it's the best, and should have probably won.
I did not LOVE this book, but I think that's mostly because the character arcs it engages with are driven by motivations that are largely alien to me. For all that, I do find the characters well-drawn and compelling, the setting vivdly realized, the plot exciting, and the prose really, really good. For a debut novel, it's hella impressive, and I'm very glad that it was recognized with an Astounding award for Parker-Chan, if not with the Hugo I think it also deserved. The whole package reminded me of the Guy Gavriel Kay books I like -- the solid sense of history and place, the numinous, low-touch magic, the combination of epic sweep of the big picture and personal detail. The prose is more versatile, I think -- I appreciated the ways it could be lyrical, dramatic, grand -- but also grounded and rough when it needed to be. And while there was the sense of inevitability driving a lot of the narrative, there were also twists I did not see coming, like spoilers Zhu murdering the Prince of Radiance.
Now, the characters stuff:
I could respect where Zhu started out, faced with a choice (she thought) between oblivion on her own behalf or assuming her brother's identity and thus his greatness -- greatness as the only path to survival is a really neat thing I haven't seen before. And I could buy that motivation and follow Zhu along while it drove her, including to some questionable things, like framing Prefect Fang (who, in fairness, had been a huge jerk to her and in general) and murdering the new governor of Lu in an awful way. But once I got to the part where Zhu realizes that greatness is no longer the only way out, where her ambition becomes a choice, I confess she lost me. And I don't know, maybe that's the point -- I mean, by the end of the book she murders a child in her care simply because he's outlived his usefulness to her/become a liability, I don't know that I'm supposed to be rooting for her anymore -- but I just find ambition such a difficult driver to understand, and thus it's a boring motivation for me to read about. Presumably Zhu actually does become Emperor, but I don't care. (And I don't really get Ma's motivation in this, either, even if Zhu is the first person to have given her a choice.) Really, at this point the only person around Zhu that I'm invested in/rooting for is Xu Da, and to a much lesser degree Jiao the engineer, but that's not much to go on.
Over with the Mongolians, I quite like the grand drama and tragedy playing out, except that pretty much everything over there is driven by Ouyang's tragic secret revenge plot (or at least intersects with it), and I find revenge as a motivation almost as incomprehensible (and boring) as ambition. I probably like Ouyang himself the least of the three men central to the action there, because he is too hung up on his past (justifiably tragic, yes, but I find angst boring to read about), but I really loved his conflicted dynamic with Esen (especially the resentment that while Esen loves and accepts him, he doesn't understand Ouyang's trauma, or doesn't want to think about it, and thus obliviously causes him hurt), and Esen himself, from the joyful obliviousness at the start to the fraught UST to Esen falling apart after his father's death and still clinging to Ouyang to the final confrontation where Ouyang tries to give him a sword and Esen refuses to fight him and Ouyang kills him in an embrace (I got Blake/Avon vibes from that last scene). I would totally read Esen/Ouyang fic, except it looks like the fandom leans into the angst, which is the opposite of what I want, really. I also quite like Wang Baoxiang, who I do believe is doing all the actual valuable work in that household, while Esen labradors around and Ouyang drowns in self-loathing and plots. Being the only sensible person who keeps things running while wishing other people had some appreciation for civilization is a much more relevant-to-me motivation that ambition or revenge, and I'm hoping to see more of Baoxiang in the sequel, ideally finding his way to people who will actually appreciate what he brings to the table.
I understand from the afterword and some other stuff I saw that this book is a retelling of a historical legend (except for the part where Zhu is not cis male). Since I don't know the story, the twists and turns surprised me (except for the landslide thing; I guessed what was going to happen there courtesy of the animated Mulan). And the various schemes and betrayals are working well for me -- people with different priorities and conflicting ambitions working against each other even when they're nominal allies, it's great and scratches the ASOIAF itch quite nicely.
I have no intrinsic interest in the Asian setting, but I liked the way it was realized through language, especially idiom, and through the cultural perceptions and descriptions (of beauty, or metaphors), to a lesser degree. Some of my favorite examples: "blowing up the cow skin", "black face black mouth", or the descriptions/similes like "the monk's face was as pale and finely wrinkled as tofu skin" and "the particular combination of awe and pity that one gets from seeing fragile pear blossoms in rain" and "squinted up at her like a bad-tempered bamboo rat". Oh, and this is not setting specific, but I also loved Ma thinking of Zhu being "as self-contained as a geode".
I also liked the way the book committed to character POV; terms that characters would know the meaning of are pretty much never explained; different groups use different names for the same people and I'm not sure that I got them mapped correctly in all cases, but I really respect it being left as an exercise to the reader to figure that stuff out, because you really are seeing this world from two distinct POVs (well, more than two, because Ouyang and Baoxiang and some other characters are more complicatedly bicultural, but anyway). Oh, and also the hours -- Snake, Rabbit, Monkey, etc; those ones are explained enough to be able to follow along, but it was neatly grounding in a different setting.
I haven't talked about the gender stuff yet. It's interesting, in that I don't think I've read many books with this particular view, focused on characters who are outside the gender binary. Ouyang is not interesting to me from this perspective, since his situation is the resault of trauma, but Zhu is more so. It's interesting that she very clearly and consistently thinks of herself as "she", even while she's trying to hide her femaleness from Heaven -- while at the same time being uncomfortable with her female body (at least at first; which is understandable, since it makes her existence in the monastery complicated and fraught), and feels wrong in female clothes when she's forced to disguise herself, and does not seem to think of herself as a woman, in fact, when Lady Riu says she's a woman, Zhu responds -- "violently" that she's not -- but also not as a man. As soon as Zhu reveals herself to Ma, Ma goes from thinking of Zhu as "he" to also thinking of her as "she" -- but Xu Da, who's known Zhu's secret for years, thinks of Zhu firmly as "little brother" ("You're my brother, whatever's under your clothes"); it's an interesting combination. Also unusual is that Zhu seems to be asexual but not aromantic -- and someone who has sex (there's an explicit sex scene), because while she doesn't get pleasure from it herself, there's pleasure in making her partner feel good. (The actual sex left me completely cold, but I enjoyed Zhu and Ma's banter, both when they are first getting to know each other and as a married couple.)
While I was reading the book, I periodically kept thinking of The Poppy War -- not just because of the fantasy-historical-China setting (differently historical, and with different levels of magic, anyway; I was curious to learn, via this interview, that the magical elements of SWBTS was not always intended to be there, but added to make it fit at Tor), but more because Rin and Zhu as protagonists made me think of each other, not because they're similar but as a study in contrasts. They're quite different, despite their humble beginnings and survival-motivated drive to succeed. When we were reading The Poppy War, cafemassolit and I concluded that Rin was a "dark Hufflepuff" -- she is driven by a need to belong and her superpower is hard work which is willing to sacrifice anything (at least based on the first book, after which I bailed on the series). Zhu is pretty clearly a Slytherin, both in her guile hero ways and her ambition, which it takes a while for her to recognize is MORE than just the drive to survive. It's an interesting contrast, but I did find Rin the more compelling protagonist.
Oh, right, and so, people with the Mandate of Heaven can see thosts. Currently, with the Prince of Radiance gone, that seems to leave: Zhu, obviously; Zhang (whom we saw produce an orange flame, and probably see Ouyang's ghosts); the Great Khan (producing a flame, and looking at a point beyond Ouyang, so presumably at his ghosts). So then the interesting thing is that Wang Baoxiang also seems to be aware of Ouyang's ghosts, which appears to be a somewhat recent development -- he starts saying to Ouyang, "I knew what was in your heart long before I saw your--" and then cuts himself off, but it's pretty clear.
Quotes:
"The sullen brown astringency of a six-times-boiled elm root, which induced a faint nausea and left the inside of your cheeks corrugated with the reminder of having eaten."
The Prime Minister: "his white beard and darting eyes gave him the paranoid, vicious air of a winter ermine."
"Loathing, shame, and anger rushed through him as a series of escalating internal temperatures."
"Baoxiang always ate with chopstick, swooping for morsels with an extravagant flourish that brought to mind the mating of swallows."
"she had thought she would get a grim satisfaction from it [killing with her own hands] -- that despite everything else, at least it proved she was capable of doing what she needed to do. Now she knew: she was capable. But there was no satisfaction in it, only a lingering sick feeling."
"His ancestral line with iccumulating dead: always more who were dead than were ever alive at any moment, to mourn them."
"His smoothness made Esen want to hurt -- to twist until some jagged sincerity might be produced."
"He [Esen] owned everything he laid his eyes on, and that included Ouyang. He had merely reached for something beautiful, confusing it for another of his precious things, and when the object of this mild desire slipped away he didn't even remember it had been in his grasp at all."
"As it turned out, there was no need for anyone to recalibrate their opinions of Chen's mercy: he had merely been saving his dramatics for Right Minister Guo. [...] Old Guo was skinned alive."
Esen: "Don't kneel. [...] You did your best." "But Ouyang hadn't done his best. He hadn't even tried. [...] [Esen] knew Ouyang better than anyone. How could he really believe that had been his best effort?"
*
Two 10+ hour long flights also meant the chance to watch several movies I'd wanted to see (and some that I didn't necessarily, but they were there -- SAS's entertainment selection was pretty limited, and did not change between our August and September flights, alas). These were the movies I watched on the flights over:
Dune (the new one) -- OK, that was a good movie. It wasn't a movie that I loved, but I wasn't expecting to, given that I don't love the book (I read it out of a sense of SFF literacy obligation at some point before I started tracking my reading on LJ, and don't feel like I got much more out of it than that). But anyway, I was impressed with how well it managed to adapt a difficult-to-adapt book, and how watchable it was despite its length and the complexity of the background to what is happening. Things that were supposed to be creepy, like the Bene-Gesserit, were creepy; things that were meant to be awe-inspiring, like the vistas and the sandworms, were sufficiently impressive even on a very small screen. I totally see why everyone was suddenly shipping Paul/Duncan Idaho (I'm not feeling fannish about this movie one bit, but if one were to feel fannish, I can see why it would be in that direction). The thing I totally did not anticipate, though, and which was therefore my favorite moment in the movie, was Jessica telling sleepy teenage Paul to use the Voice to make her pass him the juice, and him being like, "aww, mom, I just woke up" -- that made me laugh out loud, because I was 100% not expecting it from Serious Dune, because it was so plausible as a teenage boy thing. Oh, also, the Dune mouse was very cute! L had no interest in watching this movie, but I paused mine on a good shot of it so that she could also see the space tushkanchik.
Death on the Nile (the Kenneth Branagh one) -- we had watched Death on the Orient Express at home as a family during Covid, and even toyed with the idea of going to see 'Nile' in theaters, because it was a rare movie that B actually wanted to see, but that ended up not happening, but now B, L, and I all watched it separately during the flight to Europe. I had liked 'Orient Express' decently, but mostly for Poirot himself; this one I liked more, because I liked the other characters (or their portrayals anyway) more than in 'Express', and I think I liked the story more, too. Speaking of the actors, I kept finding them really familiar but mostly couldn't place them -- Gal Gadot was the only one I successfully figured out, and even that was mostly down to the accent (I'm very bad at this in general). When I got to the cast list, some of them were like "OH!" -- Armie Hammer and Tom Bateman -- but then some I couldn't explain why they looked familiar, like Mrs Van Schuyler and Jackie. Anyway, I enjoyed everyone's acting, the mix of characters (Mrs Van Schuyler was a particular favorite), and the various revelations. I continue to find Branagh's Poirot very entertaining, but he was less effective for me in the more serious moments, like mourning Bouc or his lost love, and I totally did not buy him stammering around the singer lady. I also thought the B&W wartime opening was unnecessary/didn't add anything to the movie for me; also, clean-shaven Poirot at the end was just weird! Bring back the ridiculous moustache!
Smallfoot -- look it was like 6 hours into a long flight, and I needed to watch something brainless. Even then, this was a pretty dumb movie. I guess some of the dumb stuff would've been a lot more appealing to little kids (all the physical comedy of characters falling and bonking their heads), but I just found it tedious. Also, the songs were REALLY bad -- so inane and insipid! (both L and I remarked on this independently; she also tried watching this movie, but gave up on it before finishing in favor of something like Young Sheldon). The one deeper thing in this nonsense was the very on-the-nose stuff about government lying to its citizens, but all of it was so ridiculous and the solution was so facile that it only made the whole thing worse (although the ending of the movie was a little more palatable than the beginning and middle). The visual design also didn't work particularly well for me -- the yetis were neither cute nor, like, nuancedly expressive? And I found it distracting that Gwangi's hair/fur was a different color and texture than the other yetis, but this was not the case for the other yetis voiced by African-American voice actors (Gwangi is LeBron James). As a final note, I was amused that I randomly happened to watch two movies starring Zendaya on the same flight: Dune and this thing XD
*
I ran out of room (on LJ, but I'm trying to keep LJ and DW in sync) for the Hugo thoughts, so that will be in the next post, along with the rest of the movies and possibly also the rest of the books.
I also watched a bunch of movies on planes, which I've also written up. And the Hugo Awards were over the weekend, and I have thoughts. I couldn't get everything, or even meaningful chunks to fit in a single post, so let's see how this goes. I'm prioritizing getting my thoughts on Hugo-nominated things out, and then we'll see.
*
9. Cat Valente, The Past is Red -- I was at first very confused about this novella when I started seeing write-ups for it among the Hugo posts, because it sounded so familiar, but like something I had read several years ago, and then how could it be nonimated for a Hugo this year? sophia_sol's post finally made it make sense -- this novella is an expansion of an earlier novelette ("The Future is Blue"), which I must've read in an anthology at some point, possibly without realizing that it was by Cat Valente, because I remember quite liking it, and I was of the firm belief that I'd never liked anything by Cat Valente until The Refrigerator Monologues. The original novelette forms the first part of this novella (I'm not sure if Valente made any changes to it or not; there were a few parts I did not recall, but also it's been years), and I still really like it! I'm much more mixed on the new stuff; in particular, the middle section dragged for me, and while I was reading that, I was thinking that the expansion may have actually been a net negative to my enjoyment. I did eventually get to more stuff that I liked towards the end, so I do think it's a net positive, but not very strongly. Spoilers I liked the revelation of the Martian colony and its refusal to have anything to do with the Garbagetowners, I liked the reveal of who Big Red is (which I figured out just a tiny bit ahead of the on-page reveal, and then went back and reread the introduction of Big Red and enjoyed the way things about her are foreshadowed -- "she's not allowed to go outside", and a ship being neither inside nor outside (which at first sounds like it's about Tetley's boat but is actually about the colony spaceships)), and I liked most of the stuff with Mister. But in-between, there are too many places where the catvalentness of the prose overwhelms Tetley's idiosyncratic, compelling voice (note to self: "The Future is Blue" appeared in the Drowned Worlds anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan; The Past is Red is a Tor.com title, but I haven't been able to figure out the editor for it yet; I'm taking note of these things because I'm really curious to know whether the difference between a Cat Valente story that works for me and one that doesn't is editorial input, as the failure mode of her writing for me is one that I think can be corrected by an editor taking a machete to the prose. But anyway.) Despite the all-too-frequent catvalentness of the prose, there were a number of quotes I really liked:
On the trophies: "Oh, I know [the Fuckwits] were all the worst kind of death-guzzling monsters, sick and swollen as blood blisters, stupid, hungry, toothful voids [...] Imagine being so alive and conscious of the importance of every single second of constantly winnowing life, every single simplest action and choice and effort and onrushing death, that you would carefully mark out Little Lucy having fun and crown her for it like the Queen of Time. Imagine having so much energy to spare after finding food and shelter and clothing and some tiny goddamn scrap of company that you figured you'd make a beautiful silver cup, not because some kid did the best job, but just because she tried the hardest. [...] Imagine having that much left over that you give one single ghostly shit about the eighth-best daffodil." "All their mountain of golden wasteful love."
Watching "Cheers": "they kept drinking and drinking like there would never stop being enough to pour down their gorgeous slavering maws"
"All seagulls are dead-eyed psychos. If the whole Fuckwit culture was a bird, it would be a seagull. Ravenous, stupid, vicious, not a single shit given, nice feathers."
"I want to have to watch what I eat because it's so easy to get fat."
"the horrifying feeling of the girl from subscription Services suddenly denying you the right to be ignored"
13. Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built -- when I first heard that Becky Chambers was writing a book about a tea monk and a robot, I thought that sounded potentially adorable; Chambers does not always work for me, but her writing of AI characters in A Close and Common Orbit was a thing I particularly enjoyed, and I was hoping for more like that. Then the book came out and I read the reviews, and decided I wasn't even going to bother, because it now sounded like this was Chambers leaning into all of the things about her writing that DON'T work for me. Then it showed up on the Hugo ballot and the voter packet, and I figured I'd give it a shot, but got bored on page 2 and figured that was enough for me. But then I was on the 10 hour flight back home, with no new movies I wanted to watch, and it turned out that the only book on my Kindle that I had not yet read and was able to open in airplane mode was this one, so I read it after all. And, ugh, yeah, this is definitely Chambers fully embracing all the aspects of her writing that don't work for me and dispensing completely with the ones that do. I guess that's what we're doing now, and it makes me very sad, because I was genuinely enjoying the trajectory she seemed to be on as an author with Wayvarers 2 and 3, but it seems like now that she's gained recognition for cozy sci-fi, she's going to just write twee Tumblr self-care nonsense from here on out.
One of the reviews that convinced me not to bother with this book was this one by chestnut_pod (which I assume I must've gotten to via sophia_sol), and I went back to reread it after finishing. Some of the things called out didn't bother me -- I skimmed over the nature stuff and the tech stuff and the religion stuff because I found it boring -- but can see and agree with the criticisms. The thing that the linked review/rant calls out that did very much bother me was everything to do with Dex, the protagonist and POV (and the tea monk in the tea monk + robot concept pitch). Spoilers from here
I feel like the point Chambers is trying to make with Dex is that a) it's OK to not have a "purpose" in life (this is said straight out in the dialogue between Dex and Mosscap the robot, in what passes for a climax in this book, I suppose), and b) it's OK to feel unfulfilled and depressed even when objectively one has everything one needs -- a loving family, a supportive community, a career in which one helps people and is recognized for their contributions, and c) taking time for self-care is valid. I agree with all of these points in general, but the way Dex goes about embodying them, and the way the narrative reassures them (Dex is agender and uses they/them pronouns) about all this really bugged me.
So, Dex decides to change their vocation and become a tea monk, which is something that is easily done in their order. They take on this new vocation by acquiring all kinds of accoutrements of the trade but refusing to learn anything about how to do the work, saying they will learn by teaching themselves. Now, from the description of the role tea monks play in this society, they sound like therapists who serve you a cup of tea, but not only is Dex able to just... interact with the public with no training -- and it goes predictably badly when their first customer starts talking to them about her cat dying, which leads to talking about how she's drifted apart from her partner, and Dex has no idea what to do -- but very weirdly, we then get a montage of Dex learning to mix different kinds of tea and enhance the space in which the tea is served, like remedying a lack of chairs -- but it is not at all clear they they took any steps to learn what to SAY to people who come to them with their problems. Apparently the talk part of therapy requires no training, it just happens, or maybe you just need the tea. So, yeah, they magically get good at this -- becoming the best tea monk on this moon, according to their customers -- just by messing around with some herbs. (I'm kind of curious what any of the therapists on my flist would make of this book, but I'm not sure any of them are reading Chambers...)
And then when Dex needs a break from their tea monk vocation -- which is valid, they should be able to take a holiday -- they go about it in the stupidest way possible. They set off on what is essentially a wilderness hike without adequate preparation or telling anyone where they're going. In fairness, they do come to recognize that this was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do, at least, but, like. This is a person who is 29 years old, has been through two careers, one of which involved traveling on their own for two years, and a person who has been entrusted with the emotional well-being of many people -- HOW are they this dumb? Also, they bail on their professional obligations to go on this stupid quest for crickets, informing the next village that they're dealing with a personal matter. Which, like, personal emergencies come up, sure, but your existential malaise cresting is NOT an emergency, come on -- and this part is never recognized as a problem by the narrative, that I could tell.
Dex's other hangups also feel really infantile: Dex refuses to let their new robot acquaintance help them get water from a creek because there is this post-robot-emancipation abhorrence of making robots do work, and Mosscap has to point out that Dex would let a human friend offering help do them a favor and to stop being a dumbass denying it agency. Dex also feels weird about eating in front of Mosscap, who can't eat, and their solution is to put half the food on a plate for Mosscap, then demand that the very puzzled Mosscap play-act being done with the food, which makes Dex feel better about it because Reasons, I guess. There was something about this sort of unquestioning assumption that stuff would work out in their favor no matter how idiotically they go about things to prioritize their needs and soothe their ego, and that others should do stuff to conform to their cultural expectations that both really annoyed me and also I think contributed to me constantly catching myself thinking of Dex as "he" instead of "they" -- for all that they are agender, Dex felt like a real manchild of a character. (After I watched the Hugo ceremony, I need to add: in the acceptance speech, Chambers talks about how Dex resonates with people who are feeling tired, burned out, etc., and how they feel this book is giving them permission to rest, to take care of themselves. And, like, rest is good, taking care of yourself is good -- but there are constructive ways to go about it, and then there's what Dex does. As far as I could tell, Dex sets their own schedule, so they could have just, like, built in a couple of weeks of vacation, let alone time to go to a different tea monk and have a damn cup of tea. It sure doesn't seem to be concern for the people on their circuit that's stopping them, and I'm not sure what the economic setup on this moon is, but it doesn't seem like it's economic pressure that's preventing Dex from taking a break -- after all, they seemed to have no trouble parking their wagon for a couple of months while they taught themselves tea-making. So it's basically just their own hang-ups preventing them from making a more reasonable schedule, until the situation comes to a head and they bail on their responsibilities with no transition. I suppose that *is* relatable for some people, but I just find it really annoying.)
I did like Mosscap the robot OK, and the little bits we get to hear about the wild-built robots, now five generations removed from the original robots that walked out of the human factories 200 years ago, but Mosscap also very clearly exists as a guide to resolve Dex's first world problems, rather than a character with its own arc or drive.
This book further eschews any plot or even vague gestures towards one -- it's all domesticity and Tumblry conversation, framed by Dex's stupid decisions.
So, yeah, not a book that I liked. And unlike the other Becky Chambers books I found more frustrating the enjoyable (Wayfarers 1 and 4), not a book I see much redeeming value in.
10. P. Djeli Clark, A Master of Djinn -- This is a book I started several months ago, once I caught up on the short fiction set in this universe, and as part of a planned informal sync read with cafemassolit (and also because I was going to have a one-off train commute for the first time in 2 years), but then K finished it way ahead of me and I wandered off, and only came back to it once I was on vacation and was also trying to finish as many Hugo things as possible before the results came out. And I liked it, and enjoyed the read, but basically in the same way I've enjoyed all of Clark's other work: really liked the vivid, original setting, had the prose go down easy, but while I had fun meeting these characters (or seeing them again, for the returning ones), I don't feel deeply engaged by them, and the plot remains a relative weakness (but the plot thing did not bother me to any greater degree than in the shorter fiction, which was a thing I was a little nervous about with this novel-length debut).
I still really like the magical Cairo setting, but don't know that the novel expanded my appreciation of it to a significant degree. SPOILERS from here The half-Djinn thing offers some intriguing possibilities, but the stuff with the Nine Lords and the Seal I was eh on -- what I love about this setting is how urban it feels, so the high-fantasy elements like that are not what I'm here for. I do appreciate the glimpse of what is happening in other parts of the world in reaction to this magical reality -- Germany and Russia starting to look into integrating or at least interacting with their own magical denizens, England debating whether to try to get control of the magic of their colonies or reject it as barbaric in favor of scientific progress (as personified by the views of the Worthington siblings). I mean, I'm happy to keep reading Cairo magical police procedurals, but it's nice to see that broader look. The thing I did appreciate about the worldbuilding expansion is that the novel length allowed for a more nuanced look at this magical Cairo, and an exploration that, liberated as it is, there are internal problems and prejudices (ethnic and colorist and classist and religious), and even the good guys have blindspots (e.g. Fatma originally dismissing Hadia). I do feel like the solutions the book shows are too simplistic -- really, the neighbors who were trashing the "idolaters'" stores last week are now helping rebuild them, as soon as the voice preaching division is gone? -- but fine, Clark needed a way to (heh) put the genie back in the bottle, I get it.
Character-wise, I actually don't find Fatma or Siti super interesting, but Fatma is a fine police procedural protagonist and Siti is a fun love interest (and gets some great dialogue, both sultry and fighty), so they aren't problems, just not sources of particular enjoyment for me in this world. Onsi had been my favorite going in, so I enjoyed seeing a bit of him. My surprising favorite in this book was Ahmad/Sobek, whose creepy lurking and general comic relief was a highlight for me in every scene he was in; I was thus pleasantly surprised that he got to play such a pivotal role in the climax and the denouement. The other character I like a lot is Hadia, Fatma's new partner. When cafemassolit and I were talking about this book (after she finished and I hadn't), and K pointed out that Fatma is kind of a Not Like Other Girls protagonist, which makes her a bit outdated as a protagonist for such a progressive book, and, yeah, I generally agree -- like, the thing that makes her unusual is that she is a POC queer woman, which is great, but from a personality perspective, she's a SFF mystery lead played pretty straight, and so less interesting than the others who surround her. Hadia makes for a really nice foil -- this Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff hardworking nerd who likes paperwork to Fatma's swagger -- and was also just a fun character, with her unexpected skills and numerous cousins she leverages. She also fills in a hole that was kind of weirdly left in the fabric of the series cast, of a devout Muslim woman, who wears a hijab and makes time for prayer, but it definitely did not feel tokenistic. Anyway, Hadia is great, looking forward to her continued partnership with Fatma and hanging out with felow nerd Onsi.
The plot is, well. First, "the impostor has something that is controlling the Djinn/overriding their self-control" was so clear to me from the point when the librarian attacked them that it actually took me a while to realize that Fatma et al had not figured that out -- not even when Siti turned on her suddenly, that Siti actually had to explain to her she was being mind-controlled. Which, you know, does not speak well to the perspicacity of your brilliant investigator lead/the overall magical police force, but whatever. Similarly, I was pretty sure that the "AW" in Siwa's notes had to be Abigail and not her red herring brother, from about the second or thrid time that the initials were mentioned (the continued mention of Abbie's bandaged hand was quite effective at foreshadowing that; maybe too effective), and see above for the effect of how long it took Fatma et al to figure it out -- complete with the forensic magic revealing the lock of hair she expected to see, not the one that was actually there (neat idea in theory, but the execution didn't work for me very well, maybe because I was very ready for them to finally figure out what was going on). I do like the identity of the antagonit, though -- both that it's also a woman, who forges this as a path because a traditional path to power isn't open to her, and especially that everyone overlooks her as a possibiity because she uses their biases to hide, presenting herself as a weak, silly Englishwoman, who faints at the least provocation and speaks basic Arabic very badly but earnestly after years in Egypt.
Speaking of Abbie, it was interesting to me (and honestly, kind of refreshing, after a bunch of Tumblr-woke books in which everyone on the side of the good guys is very careful to do only the 21st century enlightened liberal acceptable things) that Siti's solution to dealing with Abbie before she is able to summon the Nine Lords is assassination, and that Fatma, after being initially taken aback, agrees to it as the most expedient solution. And then the way the pacifist ifrit deals with Abbie -- rendering her catatonic and erasing her whole self, which is pretty horrifying and I think worse than killing her would have been -- Fatma has a problem with that, too, but Siti does not. Which, it's partly explained as "the Djinn have their own concept of justice", but it's still really interesting to see a fairly fundamental disagreement in what is morally acceptable between two allies/two people in a relationship.
Random bits: I liked the bookseller couple, and was also amused by the jokes of the djinn who is the liason between the angels and Fatma and Hadia. The thing with the basket of severed tongues was very memorably gruesome (which I mean as a compliment, in case that wasn't clear).
11. Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars -- another book I started months ago, but only finished on the eve of the Hugo awards. I saw Ryka Aoki on a virtual panel somewhere -- I think a Tor.com event -- and found her funny and kind of scarily accomplished in a polymath sort of way, which immediately made me want to check out her new book. I was among the first set of people to get a copy when the library's orders came in, and then I proceeded to read the first 10% or so and squat on it until my renewals ran out (and then some), before finally returning it when I got a digital copy with the Hugo voter packet. And, hm. I've seen a lot of rave reviews for this book on my flist, as poignant and wildly original; I've also seen people write that it did not work for them at all -- and I can see both of those, actually, and am kind of in the middle myself (which is disappointing, because I wanted to be swept away/discover a new favorite author). The thing is, I liked and was moved deeply by some parts of this book -- but none of those things have anything to do with the speculative aspects of this book, which by and large did not work for me.
I found everything to do with Katrina's transness really powerful and affecting, in a way that I don't remember feeling with any other trans protagonist narratives I've read. I think part of it is that it doesn't flinch from the brutal parts of Katrina's history -- it is definitely a very different set of problems than the very white collar, privileged world of The Unpopular Vote, including CW for all the things self-loathing, suicidal thoughts, abuse from her family and the queer community she counted on for support (including Evan raping her), sex work (presented in an impressively non-judgemental way). The other reason, I think, is down to the intersection of Katrina's identity as a violinist and as a trans girl -- it is so specific to her, from the way Shizuka realizes she follows and predicts when it comes to mastering the violin, to the complicated feelings where Katrina hates her large hands, which she thinks are ugly, but where the larger span makes it easier for her to master difficult pieces, the violin as her voice because she can't trust her actual voice not to betray her, and, of course, the way her personality and her pain power her music ("Her tonality had been honed by a lifetime of being concerned with her voice. Her fingerings were liquid, born of years of not wanting her hands to make ugly motions. And her ability to play to a crowd, project emotion, follow physical cues? Katrina had trained in that most of all.") I was also impressed that Katrina being seen as a "trans activist" (first, and violinist second) is a ploy of Hell/the people looking to hurt Katrina -- because once it comes out that Katrina is trans, even the people on her side, the ones defending her from the awful trolls, are no longer talking about the music. (And this is only tangentially related to the rest of the paragraph, but I wanted to mention it somewhere: I also appreciated the point that people aren't all good or all bad, the "too many sections" conversation between Shizuka and Lan. And on yet a third one, this quote really struck me: "Some of the girl's stories seemed unfathomably cruel. Some of them sounded like being a teenager" -- and I do think that blend, that balance is a lot of what makes Katrina such an easy-to-follow protagonist, such an effective POV character.
A large part of this book after Shizuka Satomi becomes Katrina's violin teacher is kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy where powerful people are very nice to a young person who has survived abuse and general shittiness and give them everything they want -- it reminded me of The Goblin Emperor in that regard, only even more so, because spoilers from here Shizuka is so very powerful -- she has the money to give Katrina any material things she wants, from nice clothes to a souped up violin, and she has access to sci-fi technology through Lan, and apparently also arcane powers, like making a nasty violin shop proprietor die of a heart attack after being mean to Katrina and have the house of the MC who screwed up Katrina's first public performance burn down. The latter part went a bit too far IMO, but I do think that it's interesting that Shizuka is definitely not a nice person, she's just a ruthless and powerful person in Katrina's corner, and I certainly don't begrudge Katrina the wish-fulfillment, certainly not when the world is still really stacked against her. I also thought it was interesting that a magical -- well, science fictional -- transition option is presented to Katrina by Shirley, and she considers it and leaves it as an option for later, but prioritizes being able to play at the competition (in her current body that has done all the work) over the immediate magical solution. And Katrina's response to Shirley's offer to "make [her] a girl" -- "Besides, I'm already a girl" -- felt both hopeful and triumphant in this context.
I also found everything to do with music really powerful, which is definitely entirely to the narrative's credit, since I know nothing about playing music, and was mostly unfamiliar with the pieces being talked about, including the Bartok, but when the book describes it as "what does a dying genius say, in his last final word, with a voice that is not his own" (witing a piece for violin when he was a pianist), stuff like that really got me anyway. The author, and the POV characters who do care about music, really sold me on the importance of it both to themselves and to humanity (well, intelligent life in general, by the end). The true climax of the book, which is Katrina performing the Bartok piece, the narrative going through it movement by movement, really worked for me, and that's pretty impressive, I think. And ditto for violin as a physical object, in Lucy Matia's thread; I know even less about what a luthier does, but all of those descriptions worked powerfully for me as well. And the echoes of other women in the music -- the Amati daughter from whom Lucy Matia takes her line, the nameless Chinese carpenter who made Aubergine. And I really liked that there was a brief scene where Tamiko, who seemed to be initially set up as a rival for Katrina, fragile, troubled Tamiko in the crosshairs of Hell, speaks up for Katrina at the performance: "She's a girl, you dipshit! [...] Shut up. Can we just hear her play?"
I knew about the trans protagonist and about the violin stuff from the cover blurb; the thing I totally did not expect to find as powerful as I did was everything about the food and the sense of neighborhood, and the way those two things intersect and almost stand in for/represent each other, the way they layer and evolve -- Astrid's fusion of Asian and European, Hainan chicken at Caputo's Pizza, and even Lan going into paroxysms over Olive Garden (which I'm unironically fond of and kind of miss). Even the demon is weirdly humanized through his consumption of food.
Of course, the whole Starrgate Donut storyline is at the center of the food-and-neighborhood focus, and that part of it worked well for me -- Aunty Floresta and Edwin exploring the local eateries and what makes them special and bringing the abstract essences of that back to learn to make proper donuts, which cannot be simply replicated -- with the addition of some sci-fi tools, like "reduced gravity in the proofing box for added fluffiness" and microsecond laser bursts in the oven to give "cake donuts the perfect crunch around the edges" and "a lattice of nanoperforations that len in just the right amount of coffee"; this was the only sci-fi element which worked for me in this book. The rest of the sci-fi stuff just felt... weirdly shallow next to the depth with which Katrina's storyline and the musical aspects were explored. Lan, Shirley, Markus, and the twins did not feel like full-fledged characters. Shirley's personhood was not deeply enough explored to be at all interesting to me. The whole thing with the Endplague and the stargate did not resonate with me at all, and the stargate as the get-out-of-jail-free solution to Shizuka's Faustian bargain did not feel satisfying to me in the least (I also did not really buy Shizuka and Lan's romance, because, see above, Lan never felt like a real character). And I kept feeling like the "refugees settling in to make a new life for themselves" aspects that this was supposed to play on would've worked better for me if they were not science fictional refugees. There are some pretty fun lines to come out of this part of the story (like, "We have a donut to calibrate" and "rotate the reference donuts"), but on the whole the SF sections threw me out of the book.
I found the fantasy aspects of this book pretty shallow too -- Shizuka's Faustian bargain and the frog-like demon dude -- but this bothered me less, for whatever reason. Maybe I'm more willing to accept this level of absurdity in a "demon wandering around a modern urban landscape" than I am with sci-fi. I still don't feel like the fantasy elements really enhanced the story to any significant degree, but at least they did not interfere with my enjoyment of the book.
Also, while I'm tallying up the negatives, for a book that had such a multifaceted exploration of women, where even firmly secondary characters like Astrid got to have more than one dimension (she is not just a kindly housekeeper but also a gifted piano player and music teacher in her own right), the male characters, well, let's say they don't get that same level of attention. They are either just there to be awful (e.g. Katrina's father, Evan, her johns, the bank CEO, the literal demon), especially by contrast to a positive female character (e.g. Helvar vs Lucy Matia), or in a strictly supporting role (Lucy's son Andrew, Edwin, who's a little kid). Which, like, it's fine, there are a lot of ways in which the tertiary characters in this book are just archetypes/functions, and those don't necessarily have to be nuanced -- but where it bothered me was with Markus, who actually gets a POV, but the only resolution of that POV seems to be... toxic masculinity, I guess? Where he rejects his mother's sacrifice to get her family to a safe place and wants to go back to fight beside his father in a poinltess galactic war, and murders two people over an insult/rejection of him -- and does not get to LEARN anything or come back from that, but is placed in stasis and will be shipped back to the Empire. Which, for a book that seems quite interested in the possibility of redemption (e.g. with Shizuka) was just weird to me. Now, Shizuka's victims chose the cursed bow (whether she, like, groomed them into it or not is not a question one can answer, I suppose); it is certainly not the same as what Markus did, but it's still a weird dichotomy to me.
Back on the positives, I was really amused by the random Asian/Asian diaspora bits that pop up here and there: All the pomp and red and gold of the "BiennialXinhua Phoenix Investment Bank Golden Friendship Violin Competition" (as well as just that name, and the "Golden Rainbow Diversity Tour") and hte prize of $888,888 dollars. The Asian-American mother saying "Not to be racist, but I wish the Chinese would stay out of our music"; "Grandma Lieu, whose family owned a Mercedes and a Lexus, was collecting empty cans". And "No matter where you live, if you have an Asian friend who can set you up with free Wi-Fi, you go with it and don't ask questions" :)
So, I'm left with complicated feelings about this one. The parts I liked were very strong, and I'm glad I got to experience them; I would happily read more by Ryka Aoki writing about music, food, place, and trans characters. But I don't think it worked for me as speculative fiction almost at all, which was NOT a failure mode I'd expected of a Hugo-nominated novel...
12. Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun -- plot twist: I did not start reading this book months ago and finish it in time for the Hugos. I did check this book out of the library several months ago, multiple times, juggling several Lucky Day copies (which cannot be renewed), until tabacoychanel took pity on me and furnished me with my own copy. I'd heard really good things about this one and wanted to give it proper attention, which finally happened at the tail end of my vacation, when I started and finished the book in a couple of days. And was really impressed! I don't know if it's my favorite out of the Hugo novel crop I read this year (which ended up being 5 out of 6 by the end), but I do think it's the best, and should have probably won.
I did not LOVE this book, but I think that's mostly because the character arcs it engages with are driven by motivations that are largely alien to me. For all that, I do find the characters well-drawn and compelling, the setting vivdly realized, the plot exciting, and the prose really, really good. For a debut novel, it's hella impressive, and I'm very glad that it was recognized with an Astounding award for Parker-Chan, if not with the Hugo I think it also deserved. The whole package reminded me of the Guy Gavriel Kay books I like -- the solid sense of history and place, the numinous, low-touch magic, the combination of epic sweep of the big picture and personal detail. The prose is more versatile, I think -- I appreciated the ways it could be lyrical, dramatic, grand -- but also grounded and rough when it needed to be. And while there was the sense of inevitability driving a lot of the narrative, there were also twists I did not see coming, like spoilers Zhu murdering the Prince of Radiance.
Now, the characters stuff:
I could respect where Zhu started out, faced with a choice (she thought) between oblivion on her own behalf or assuming her brother's identity and thus his greatness -- greatness as the only path to survival is a really neat thing I haven't seen before. And I could buy that motivation and follow Zhu along while it drove her, including to some questionable things, like framing Prefect Fang (who, in fairness, had been a huge jerk to her and in general) and murdering the new governor of Lu in an awful way. But once I got to the part where Zhu realizes that greatness is no longer the only way out, where her ambition becomes a choice, I confess she lost me. And I don't know, maybe that's the point -- I mean, by the end of the book she murders a child in her care simply because he's outlived his usefulness to her/become a liability, I don't know that I'm supposed to be rooting for her anymore -- but I just find ambition such a difficult driver to understand, and thus it's a boring motivation for me to read about. Presumably Zhu actually does become Emperor, but I don't care. (And I don't really get Ma's motivation in this, either, even if Zhu is the first person to have given her a choice.) Really, at this point the only person around Zhu that I'm invested in/rooting for is Xu Da, and to a much lesser degree Jiao the engineer, but that's not much to go on.
Over with the Mongolians, I quite like the grand drama and tragedy playing out, except that pretty much everything over there is driven by Ouyang's tragic secret revenge plot (or at least intersects with it), and I find revenge as a motivation almost as incomprehensible (and boring) as ambition. I probably like Ouyang himself the least of the three men central to the action there, because he is too hung up on his past (justifiably tragic, yes, but I find angst boring to read about), but I really loved his conflicted dynamic with Esen (especially the resentment that while Esen loves and accepts him, he doesn't understand Ouyang's trauma, or doesn't want to think about it, and thus obliviously causes him hurt), and Esen himself, from the joyful obliviousness at the start to the fraught UST to Esen falling apart after his father's death and still clinging to Ouyang to the final confrontation where Ouyang tries to give him a sword and Esen refuses to fight him and Ouyang kills him in an embrace (I got Blake/Avon vibes from that last scene). I would totally read Esen/Ouyang fic, except it looks like the fandom leans into the angst, which is the opposite of what I want, really. I also quite like Wang Baoxiang, who I do believe is doing all the actual valuable work in that household, while Esen labradors around and Ouyang drowns in self-loathing and plots. Being the only sensible person who keeps things running while wishing other people had some appreciation for civilization is a much more relevant-to-me motivation that ambition or revenge, and I'm hoping to see more of Baoxiang in the sequel, ideally finding his way to people who will actually appreciate what he brings to the table.
I understand from the afterword and some other stuff I saw that this book is a retelling of a historical legend (except for the part where Zhu is not cis male). Since I don't know the story, the twists and turns surprised me (except for the landslide thing; I guessed what was going to happen there courtesy of the animated Mulan). And the various schemes and betrayals are working well for me -- people with different priorities and conflicting ambitions working against each other even when they're nominal allies, it's great and scratches the ASOIAF itch quite nicely.
I have no intrinsic interest in the Asian setting, but I liked the way it was realized through language, especially idiom, and through the cultural perceptions and descriptions (of beauty, or metaphors), to a lesser degree. Some of my favorite examples: "blowing up the cow skin", "black face black mouth", or the descriptions/similes like "the monk's face was as pale and finely wrinkled as tofu skin" and "the particular combination of awe and pity that one gets from seeing fragile pear blossoms in rain" and "squinted up at her like a bad-tempered bamboo rat". Oh, and this is not setting specific, but I also loved Ma thinking of Zhu being "as self-contained as a geode".
I also liked the way the book committed to character POV; terms that characters would know the meaning of are pretty much never explained; different groups use different names for the same people and I'm not sure that I got them mapped correctly in all cases, but I really respect it being left as an exercise to the reader to figure that stuff out, because you really are seeing this world from two distinct POVs (well, more than two, because Ouyang and Baoxiang and some other characters are more complicatedly bicultural, but anyway). Oh, and also the hours -- Snake, Rabbit, Monkey, etc; those ones are explained enough to be able to follow along, but it was neatly grounding in a different setting.
I haven't talked about the gender stuff yet. It's interesting, in that I don't think I've read many books with this particular view, focused on characters who are outside the gender binary. Ouyang is not interesting to me from this perspective, since his situation is the resault of trauma, but Zhu is more so. It's interesting that she very clearly and consistently thinks of herself as "she", even while she's trying to hide her femaleness from Heaven -- while at the same time being uncomfortable with her female body (at least at first; which is understandable, since it makes her existence in the monastery complicated and fraught), and feels wrong in female clothes when she's forced to disguise herself, and does not seem to think of herself as a woman, in fact, when Lady Riu says she's a woman, Zhu responds -- "violently" that she's not -- but also not as a man. As soon as Zhu reveals herself to Ma, Ma goes from thinking of Zhu as "he" to also thinking of her as "she" -- but Xu Da, who's known Zhu's secret for years, thinks of Zhu firmly as "little brother" ("You're my brother, whatever's under your clothes"); it's an interesting combination. Also unusual is that Zhu seems to be asexual but not aromantic -- and someone who has sex (there's an explicit sex scene), because while she doesn't get pleasure from it herself, there's pleasure in making her partner feel good. (The actual sex left me completely cold, but I enjoyed Zhu and Ma's banter, both when they are first getting to know each other and as a married couple.)
While I was reading the book, I periodically kept thinking of The Poppy War -- not just because of the fantasy-historical-China setting (differently historical, and with different levels of magic, anyway; I was curious to learn, via this interview, that the magical elements of SWBTS was not always intended to be there, but added to make it fit at Tor), but more because Rin and Zhu as protagonists made me think of each other, not because they're similar but as a study in contrasts. They're quite different, despite their humble beginnings and survival-motivated drive to succeed. When we were reading The Poppy War, cafemassolit and I concluded that Rin was a "dark Hufflepuff" -- she is driven by a need to belong and her superpower is hard work which is willing to sacrifice anything (at least based on the first book, after which I bailed on the series). Zhu is pretty clearly a Slytherin, both in her guile hero ways and her ambition, which it takes a while for her to recognize is MORE than just the drive to survive. It's an interesting contrast, but I did find Rin the more compelling protagonist.
Oh, right, and so, people with the Mandate of Heaven can see thosts. Currently, with the Prince of Radiance gone, that seems to leave: Zhu, obviously; Zhang (whom we saw produce an orange flame, and probably see Ouyang's ghosts); the Great Khan (producing a flame, and looking at a point beyond Ouyang, so presumably at his ghosts). So then the interesting thing is that Wang Baoxiang also seems to be aware of Ouyang's ghosts, which appears to be a somewhat recent development -- he starts saying to Ouyang, "I knew what was in your heart long before I saw your--" and then cuts himself off, but it's pretty clear.
Quotes:
"The sullen brown astringency of a six-times-boiled elm root, which induced a faint nausea and left the inside of your cheeks corrugated with the reminder of having eaten."
The Prime Minister: "his white beard and darting eyes gave him the paranoid, vicious air of a winter ermine."
"Loathing, shame, and anger rushed through him as a series of escalating internal temperatures."
"Baoxiang always ate with chopstick, swooping for morsels with an extravagant flourish that brought to mind the mating of swallows."
"she had thought she would get a grim satisfaction from it [killing with her own hands] -- that despite everything else, at least it proved she was capable of doing what she needed to do. Now she knew: she was capable. But there was no satisfaction in it, only a lingering sick feeling."
"His ancestral line with iccumulating dead: always more who were dead than were ever alive at any moment, to mourn them."
"His smoothness made Esen want to hurt -- to twist until some jagged sincerity might be produced."
"He [Esen] owned everything he laid his eyes on, and that included Ouyang. He had merely reached for something beautiful, confusing it for another of his precious things, and when the object of this mild desire slipped away he didn't even remember it had been in his grasp at all."
"As it turned out, there was no need for anyone to recalibrate their opinions of Chen's mercy: he had merely been saving his dramatics for Right Minister Guo. [...] Old Guo was skinned alive."
Esen: "Don't kneel. [...] You did your best." "But Ouyang hadn't done his best. He hadn't even tried. [...] [Esen] knew Ouyang better than anyone. How could he really believe that had been his best effort?"
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Two 10+ hour long flights also meant the chance to watch several movies I'd wanted to see (and some that I didn't necessarily, but they were there -- SAS's entertainment selection was pretty limited, and did not change between our August and September flights, alas). These were the movies I watched on the flights over:
Dune (the new one) -- OK, that was a good movie. It wasn't a movie that I loved, but I wasn't expecting to, given that I don't love the book (I read it out of a sense of SFF literacy obligation at some point before I started tracking my reading on LJ, and don't feel like I got much more out of it than that). But anyway, I was impressed with how well it managed to adapt a difficult-to-adapt book, and how watchable it was despite its length and the complexity of the background to what is happening. Things that were supposed to be creepy, like the Bene-Gesserit, were creepy; things that were meant to be awe-inspiring, like the vistas and the sandworms, were sufficiently impressive even on a very small screen. I totally see why everyone was suddenly shipping Paul/Duncan Idaho (I'm not feeling fannish about this movie one bit, but if one were to feel fannish, I can see why it would be in that direction). The thing I totally did not anticipate, though, and which was therefore my favorite moment in the movie, was Jessica telling sleepy teenage Paul to use the Voice to make her pass him the juice, and him being like, "aww, mom, I just woke up" -- that made me laugh out loud, because I was 100% not expecting it from Serious Dune, because it was so plausible as a teenage boy thing. Oh, also, the Dune mouse was very cute! L had no interest in watching this movie, but I paused mine on a good shot of it so that she could also see the space tushkanchik.
Death on the Nile (the Kenneth Branagh one) -- we had watched Death on the Orient Express at home as a family during Covid, and even toyed with the idea of going to see 'Nile' in theaters, because it was a rare movie that B actually wanted to see, but that ended up not happening, but now B, L, and I all watched it separately during the flight to Europe. I had liked 'Orient Express' decently, but mostly for Poirot himself; this one I liked more, because I liked the other characters (or their portrayals anyway) more than in 'Express', and I think I liked the story more, too. Speaking of the actors, I kept finding them really familiar but mostly couldn't place them -- Gal Gadot was the only one I successfully figured out, and even that was mostly down to the accent (I'm very bad at this in general). When I got to the cast list, some of them were like "OH!" -- Armie Hammer and Tom Bateman -- but then some I couldn't explain why they looked familiar, like Mrs Van Schuyler and Jackie. Anyway, I enjoyed everyone's acting, the mix of characters (Mrs Van Schuyler was a particular favorite), and the various revelations. I continue to find Branagh's Poirot very entertaining, but he was less effective for me in the more serious moments, like mourning Bouc or his lost love, and I totally did not buy him stammering around the singer lady. I also thought the B&W wartime opening was unnecessary/didn't add anything to the movie for me; also, clean-shaven Poirot at the end was just weird! Bring back the ridiculous moustache!
Smallfoot -- look it was like 6 hours into a long flight, and I needed to watch something brainless. Even then, this was a pretty dumb movie. I guess some of the dumb stuff would've been a lot more appealing to little kids (all the physical comedy of characters falling and bonking their heads), but I just found it tedious. Also, the songs were REALLY bad -- so inane and insipid! (both L and I remarked on this independently; she also tried watching this movie, but gave up on it before finishing in favor of something like Young Sheldon). The one deeper thing in this nonsense was the very on-the-nose stuff about government lying to its citizens, but all of it was so ridiculous and the solution was so facile that it only made the whole thing worse (although the ending of the movie was a little more palatable than the beginning and middle). The visual design also didn't work particularly well for me -- the yetis were neither cute nor, like, nuancedly expressive? And I found it distracting that Gwangi's hair/fur was a different color and texture than the other yetis, but this was not the case for the other yetis voiced by African-American voice actors (Gwangi is LeBron James). As a final note, I was amused that I randomly happened to watch two movies starring Zendaya on the same flight: Dune and this thing XD
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I ran out of room (on LJ, but I'm trying to keep LJ and DW in sync) for the Hugo thoughts, so that will be in the next post, along with the rest of the movies and possibly also the rest of the books.