Reading roundup, BBC Ghosts, Snowflake days 4 & 5
Final signal boost for fandomtrees! It's down to a single tree that doesn't have the minimum 2 gifts for the collection to open: this tree, requesting fic for House of the Dragon, Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, and Cinderella Phenomenon, if anyone can help out with those. The fest has a minimum of only 100 words for fic, and the gift(s) need to be in by the end of tomorrow, Jan 10, for the collection to open on the currently scheduled Jan 11 date. (I'm very much looking forward to seeing what lovely people have left me here, can you tell? :P)
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A wild book post appears!
20. Everina Maxwell, Ocean's Echo -- I had a weird trajectory with this book. I got a copy of the ARC back in October, I think, and started buddy-reading it with cafemassolit, buoyed by Maxwell's description of this as "It’s not Captain Carrot x Moist von Lipwig but it’s not NOT that". And this is a just description! And I really love the not!Moist (Tennalhin Halkana) and all the shenanigans he gets into, almost reflexively. I also like the not!Carrot (Surit Yeni) with his implacable sense of decency, and his placid exterior belying an extremely clever mind and strong will, just a lot less flashy than Tennal's. I like the way their relationship develops at the start (more on this below), I like Tennal's relationships with everyone, which tend to be prickly and interesting, because of the kind of person he is, I like Surit's bureaucratic virtuosity (he is such a Hufflepuff Primary, Ravenclaw Secondary, it's lovely to see). Anyway, both leads are great, and I enjoyed both their POVs, and the two of them crashing together. But as the book wears on, there the worldbuilding elements start growing in prominence relative to the character stuff, and I cared much less about that part; honestly, once the serious spec-fic elements of this (beyond general space fleet stuff) kicked in, I got bored and wandered away for months.
See, the spec fic stuff the book is about is telepathic powers (powered by the Remnants that were introduced in Winter's Orbit), spoilers from here, how they relate to being able to navigate chaotic space, and telepathic sync between an "architect" (telepath who can impose their will on another, temporarily) and a "reader" (who can read off emotions/thoughts, and also navigate through chaotic space based on intuition). Readers are distrusted in this society, ostensibly because it's a thing that can be done sneakily, without a person's knowledge, unlike being written by an architect, but really because they were selected to be the scapegoats in a past civil war, which makes a lot more sense. Tennal is a reader, which his aunt feels is hurting his chances, so she concocts a scheme to basically turn him into an architect by forcing him to synch with an architect she then plans to have killed -- the foreshadowing of this was nicely done, and the reveal itself was very cool. Surit is the sacrificial Rank One architect (neither he nor Tennal know what the real plan is, of course), the child of an infamous "traitor" and thus very disposable. The part of the book where Tennal refuses to cooperate, after being Primed (drugged, basically) for a sync against his will, and then Surit refuses to cooperate, because he comes to realize that Tennal did not consent to the synch / was not really given the opportunity to refuse, even when Tennal, driven mad by the boredom of house arrest, tells him to do it -- is great! The part where the two of them, at Surit's instigation, FAKE being telepathically synched, is fabulous, my favorite part of the book -- there's all this glorious evolution from Tennal viewing Surit as an enemy and then an obstacle and then a fellow victim -- and then an ALLY and co-conspirator, there's the two of them having to trust each other to improvise, it's great. But then, for Reasons, as I knew had to happen, the two of them DO actually sync telepathically, and the part where they start merging into one being with weird powers who forgets to breathe is well done and all, but also I do not care. I would've said that I liked the Telepathic Bond trope -- I've written in in my own Magnum Opus, e.g. -- but I think for me the interesting thing about it is navigating around it -- how do you hide things from the person living inside your brain? -- which is not what this take was about, almost at all. So a great deal of time is spent on the detailed worldbuilding of what it means for these two people to be deeply psychically linked, and I only wanted them to become separate again so they could have interesting interpersonal dynamics instead of a mixed-up soup of selves inside their shared brains. For the same different priorities reasons, the climaxes where first Surit "reassembles" Tennal and then Tennal "reassembles" Surit didn't really work for me as climaxes -- they were happening in a milieu I just didn't care about enough. (I also found the stuff with navigating chaotic space, interestingly described as it was, similarly boring. It is clear that Maxwell cares more about Chaotic Space than I do, and about telepathic bonds in a very different way than I do. Alas, earwax.)
I also did not care about political shenanigans with Governor Oma, or the stuff with the Resolution at the end (I found the Resolution subplot pretty boring in Winter's Orbit as well). Really, the thing that worked for me about this was the personal stuff around Tennal -- his relationship with Surit, his relationship with his younger sister Zin, his relationship with his aunt (what can I say, me and my despots), his view of himself and overcoming his demons and self-loathing. I was definitely happy for Surit's POV of Tennal -- it was generally less exhausting than Tennal's own POV of himself -- but Surit's POV of pretty much all other things was not nearly as interesting to me, so all the stuff at the end, where they are separate, was also kind of a drag. As such, I was disappointed that there wasn't more Tennal/Surit in the book. Like I said in my end-of-year meme('s comments?) -- it's not like I require romance in my SFF, and I certainly don't require sex. But I think Winter's Orbit, and also the alternating POV structure, primed me to expect this to be more of a romance than it was. I mean, Tennal and Surit get together -- or, get to the point where they're going to get together -- but as a romance this wasn't satisfying. And the other stuff was fine, but it appears that I prefer the way Maxwell writes character interaction and romance to the way she writes worldbuilding, politics, and action -- which is a preference thing, I think; her worldbuilding and politics and action are solid -- and so the fact that this book was heavier on the latter than the former, relative to Winter's Orbit and even more so relative to Course of Honor, the AO3 version of Winter's Orbit, means that I liked it less. (And, as I wondered in the other post when chatting with qwentoozla, I wonder if this trajectory is a reflection of what Maxwell wants to write -- and the character/relationship focused stuff in the AO3 version was because that's what AO3 likes -- or if it's that she needed to up the worldbuilding and action relative to romance to have the books be taken seriously seriously as sci-fi. Or maybe, you know, her preferences have changed, but it does seem like a fairly monotonic trajectory, based on these three data points...)
In Winter's Orbit, I enjoyed the secondary characters. I also enjoyed them here -- Tennal's family (Zin and the aunt), the rankers Istara and Basavi (especially the banter between Tennal and Istara, developing from the fight the first time they met). But nobody except Tennal was a major standout.
Quotes:
Tennal to Surit: "I bet your academy teachers marked you as the cadet most likely to go out in a blaze of glory saving a ship full of kittens and senior officers' children."
"Behind that focus, Tennal didn't sense caution, or bafflement, or anything Tennal usually engendered. Instead there was a single glimpse of clockwork arranging itself around Tennal's quick-fire ideas, of a vast, immovable will bending itself to a purpose. [...] Something that could meet Tennal and not be knocked off course."
"The ex was married to two bankers now, and the three of them together still added up to less of an asshole than Tennal."
Tennal in captivity:
"Good morning," the captain said. "Is there an emergency?"
"I'm out of coffee," Tennal said.
Istara to Tennal: "I'm in. Can't wait to watch you fuck this up from close quarters."
Tennal: "You're welcome. Enjoy the show."
Surit: "every time he turned around, there was Tennal -- unpredictable and razoredged, crackling like the end of a live wire. [...] Tennal was a chaos event. Surit was drawn to it like a gravity well."
Surit at a party: "'Oh, that,' Surit said, instantly relaxing. He could have talked about traffic patterns all day. If he'd known you were allowed to talk about work at this kind of party, he would have seen the point of them sooner."
"He's been distracted by [...] the way Tennal turned everything else into background."
Surit, making a joke: "I got one hundred and three percent on my covert-break-in module. The examiner wanted to give me a prize after the test but couldn't find me to do it."
"He had always dealt with problems by making himself into a bigger problem."
Tennal to Oma: "Funny way of dealing with it. I'm personally considered a leading light in the field of maladaptive coping mechanisms, but it's amazing how I never managed to brainwash hundreds of people and take over the government."
"We have solved your situation for you," Tennal announced grandly.
"You haven't!" Zin said. "You absolutely haven't!"
"We have fucked up the situation," Tennal amended, just as grandly, "in a new and interesting way."
1. Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Vita Nostra -- so, I had read the first couple of pages of Vita Nostra when I first got a copy of the book (thanks again, bearshorty!), before anything spec-ficcy started happening -- I was enjoying the prose and reading in Russian, but then my ability to fiction broke again and I set it aside. And that was long enough ago that I completely forgot what the book was supposed to be about. So then cue the end-of-year book meme, which happened to coincide with me talking about Ponedelnik/Monday Begins on Saturday in addition to me mentioning starting but not finishing Vita Nostra, and a couple of people commented on that post about the book, and I went back to the it and spent my Sunday alone reading it pretty much the entire time, for reasons I can't necessarily explain -- although I do think that it is a book that benefits from being read straight through, inhabiting this liminal world it creates without coming up for air too much. (I was complaining to scytale, before diving back in, that it felt like a very long book. The English version appears to be reasonably sized -- 416 pages, according to Goodreads -- but the Russian edition is 576. English does tend to be a more compact language, and reading some stuff from the translator, it sounds like they consciously cut some stuff like nicknames and altered quotes for copyright law reasons, but I'm still a bit O.o at the discrepancy... But anyway.)
I went back and read bearshorty's and qwentoozla's write-ups, which I'd seen before and forgot, and, yeah -- the "magic school but it sucks" (Russian edition) story definitely makes one think of Novik's Scholomance (A Deadly Education) and Grossman's Brakebills (The Magicians) -- but mostly it made me think of them in the sense that it didn't feel much like them at all (well, like Brakebills a bit, certain sections of the first book). SPOILERS from here But quite to my surprise, the "magic school but it sucks" narrative it reminded me the most of was the Fulcrum in Jemisin's Broken Earth books -- it's not AS terrible, but it's the comparison that best matches both the ominous sense that both failure and success lead to bad outcomes and the weird mixture of cruelty and semblance of caring from authority figures whose power over the students is both absolute and unknown. I did not expect that AT ALL! Meanwhile, it's nothing like the Scholomance because the Scholomance isn't actually a magic school story, I maintain -- it's a fantasy story that happens to take place inside a building where young people learn magic, and I enjoyed the sequel much more once I accepted that. And the difference with Brakebills/The Magicians is quite interesting: there is actually a strong sense of similarity in the atmosphere where the work is just this side of impossibly hard, and awful things can happen to students because the things they are learning are very dangerous, and the students learning magic are profoundly transformed -- but I do think a very key difference is that the Brakebills students chose to be there, and that what's keeping them there is pride, ambition -- not, as in the case of the this book, fear, blackmail, and, in the case of Sasha's drive towards excellence, the desire to become good enough, strong enough, that she can take revenge (before she comes to the realization that once she reaches that point, she will not care about revenge, or see the need for it).
One really interesting to both the Fulcrum and the Scholomance, though, is this: they are both awful, brutal, worse than Torpa, where the students do, at least, get to have some fun university moments and mostly don't die. But both the Fulcrum and the Scholomance at least frame themselves as the lesser evil: Young orogenes in the Broken Earth world can manifest their powers to kill entire communities, if untrained, so it is imperative that they be trained (with the side goal of the Fulcrum being very visibly in control of the orogenes in the eyes of the stills, so they are left alone to manage them). Young magic users in Novik's world are essentially bait for mals, and while the math of the Scholomance is not great (and not fair), it is better than not having a place like the Scholomance at all, in aggregate. Which, these setups are not an excuse for brutality, either active or passibe, but they are attempts at solving immediate problems, addressing a real source of danger. Vita Nostra's setup is not doing that at all: untrained, these potential Words would presumably just live out their lives like average humans. The motivation for all this appears to be, what, pushing people to reach their full potential, to transcend their humanity and become something greater. Which -- and this is the reason I mentioned Ponedelnik in my first paragraph -- is the underpinning of Monday Begins on Saturday, too -- outgrowing your human limitations, interesting and vital work with like-minded people -- just much darker.
It did feel like a very Russian (Soviet or post-Soviet) approach to "magic school" -- you're going to study magic whether you want to or not, you can't get out voluntarily, you don't get any choice about the educational process, your area of specialization is whatever you get assigned, and everything is motivated by fear. Sasha even asks her teachers and curator why everything is being done through fear, why no-one just explains what they are doing, and they all have pat answers along the lines of "you wouldn't possibly understand at this stage of your development" -- which appears to be true, or at least Sasha accepts that as she goes along. And when she asks couldn't something other than fear be used as external motivation -- love or ambition, e.g. -- the answer is, nothing motivates as strongly as fear. That combination of using the bluntest but most powerful instrument in pursuit of a lofty, ineffable sort of goal -- that is so very there to me...
I found Sasha the protagonist both enjoyable to read about and quite relatable, at least in the first parts of the book -- bzyki otlichnika [hangups of a good student] and all that, but also, hm. That reserve of will which makes her dangerous when fueled with the skills she learns -- whatever happened with her roommates, whatever she did to the attackers on break, the fact that she hit Kostya when helping him study -- none of these are things I have done, but they are all things I could see myself doing in sufficiently fraught circumstances, so it resonated quite strongly. The other characters felt like vivid sketches to me, in relationship to Sasha -- the intimate and increasingly complicated relationship with her single mother, which felt really familiar; frightening but occasionally human Farit and teachers, the way humor and tragedy are mixed with the other students and Sasha's interactions with them -- but didn't stick with me as full-fledged characters. I did like "delovaya" [bustling] Oksana, though, Sasha's first year roommate, who always had food and was angrily washing dishes and was undeterred by the alcohol ban, and wish she'd been around more. I also thought the thing between Sasha and Egor was pretty well done -- he seems like a great guy, they share a traumatic but life-affirming experience, then she leaves him behind -- but Streh's explanation for the interaction between imperative and subjunctive (I think? some kind of irrealis anyway) tenses of verbs also made a lot of sense and seems very plausible for what actually happened between them.
A thing this book really nailed, via Sasha's POV, was this feeling of personal breakthrough after a tremendous amount of work in a pressure cooker environment. That was my favorite thing about The Magicians, and is a big part of why I like magic school narratives, whether they're set among primary school children in our world, like Harry Potter, or with older students in a secondary world, like Roke or Kingkiller Chronicles' Arcanum -- and Vita Nostra does that very well, maybe better than anything else I've read, because it's so inwardly focused and underexplained, showing nonsense resolving into glimpses of meaning, showing exercises building on each other, not monotonically, with slippage, and not easily, but hard-won forward motion, showing the mental space of someone approaching a difficult mental task from the position of knowing that they've succeeded in such things before. Oh, and also, how early on, Sasha is very happy to study math, which she never liked, because unlike the "specialty" training, which is reading nonsense, math makes sense. It's very well done. Another very well evoked thing, for me anyway, was the trippiness Sasha experiences with the moving doors and changing colors in her second year, and then the sense of "appropriating", subsuming other things in her third -- it all feels very vividly described, very grounded in a weird way that makes it work for me.
One of the things I found neat is that the word "magic" is never mentioned in this book. The college refers to the subject only as "spetsial'nost'" [specialty], the introductions are generic and vague. And when the students are trying to figure out what it is they are being forced to learn, there's guesses about cults and psychadelic drugs and zombiefication and other planets, but not magic as such. It feels appropriate, for the kind of book it is, to have an entire book about learning magic that never mentions the word magic or any of its synonyms.
Another thing, tangentially, though, is on the opposite end of that -- complete mundanity. As bearshorty mentioned in her writeup as well, I've never been to a Russian-type uni. I know a little bit about how they work from my parents' stories, and what I've gleaned from friends who did attend universities in Russia, but I think this is actually the first book I've read where a protagonist was navigating a Russian/Soviet uni system, so it was interesting just from that worldbuilding perspective, the "school" part besides the "magic" part. And it was also just nice to revisit a Russian setting, all the little details that feel very familiar to my pre-emigration life -- sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and pickles to be eaten on trains, buttermilk as anti-sunburn lotion, quotes from well-known Soviet children's books,
One thing that kept jumping out at me in Sasha's conversations with her teachers was how the shifting along the formal-to-intimate continuum of speech registers is used -- the ty/vy switches and the diminutive (Sahen'ka) - common use name (Sasha) - full first name (Alexandra) - surname (Samohina) switches (e.g. Sterh tends to use "vy" (formal, respectful) and "Sashen'ka" (intimate), Portnov and Farit tend to use "ty" dismissively until by the end they're using it more as a sign of equality) -- there's a lot of interesting stuff going on at that level, I feel, which I assume is either entirely missing or was much more difficult to render in the English translation. I'm not curious enough to read this in English, but it was interesting to note.
So I clearly have a lot of thoughts about this book, and it pulled me in in a way not a lot of books have done lately. Did I actually like it? I appreciate it, certainly, for the place it has in the literary conversation of magic school narratives -- it's doing some things that I want from a magic school narrative exceptionally well, and is unique in some interesting respects (vs other things I've read, anyway). I can't say I enjoyed spending time inside this book... I appreciated Sasha's POV throughout, but she is terrified and/or lost so much of the time, and, like, I felt like I shouldn't care about anyone else too deeply because that was just going to end badly (which is consistent with how things operate within this world, so well done evoking that).
I also don't really get/like the ending. Looking at what people who've read it say about the sequel, it sounds like maybe it is intentionally ambiguous? sequel spoilers I read the ending as Sasha passing the exam because she did "reverberate" (I like this translation choice!), after rejecting fear, and also the good things happening with her family -- baby Valya's fever breaking and Valentin coming back -- imply a positive outcome, but it sounds like the sequel has it so that Sasha actually failed the exam and gets to repeat the Torpa experience? Which, I don't think I can hold that against this book, but I still don't like. /sequel spoilers Anyway, sequel stuff aside, I don't find the ending all that satisfying anyway. It feels right that even in this final exam Sasha ends up doing her own thing, going beyond where the system wants her to go -- actually, in reviewing my highlights from early in the book, I was very pleased to find that this is something that was foreshadowed/consistent from Sasha's pre-Torpa life, with her attempting the "free response" essay question instead of one of the standard ones, "kak uchili" [the way you were taught], which her teacher tells her off for. But. Finding out at the very last moment she is even speshuler than previously speshuled -- this feels like a weird place to put that reveal, especially when I don't think the notion of Passwords had been introduced earlier at all. It also doesn't feel like there's any emotional payoff in Sasha's interpersonal relationships except with her mother/family, with whom she does get a moment, but I'm not even sure what that moment really means, because there's so little context for it. She has a sort of moment of understanding with her teachers, but what happens next feels like it undermines that -- but maybe that's intentional, and I guess that's OK. There is her last scene with Egor, but I don't understand what it means in the long term -- did she help him pass the exam (with Streh's help) or does that get overwritten later, or does he just fail at the next step anyway without Sasha's intervention? I'm OK with the lack of closure with Kostya, because "lack of closure" seemed to be their whole thing, but on top of everything else being so nebulous, it's just one more ambiguous thing. And it would've been nice to have some kind of final closure with Liza, too; I know they had their reconciliation of sorts in part 2, but she was such a major part of the first book, it seems weird, narratively, to leave her behind, even though Sasha leaving people behind is basically the theme of this. I guess I was hoping for something more definitive for the ending, and whatever this was, it wasn't that.
Quotes:
re: the handsome young PE teacher: "Показывал как проходят сухожилья, как расположены мышцы -- сперва на плакате, потом на живой натуре. Натура массово требовала новых и новых объяснений."
re: Sasha trying to tutor Kostya: "Костя не понимал и от отчаяния лез целоваться."
Denis on getting a passing grade on his second try: "'Напюсь в подворотне и буду валятся в канаве.' И он улыбнулся, как Золушка при мысли о королевском бале."
"Она [...] перекачивала Егору, будто донор, свою уверенность и волю к борьбе."
I was sufficiently impressed with the book that I'd like to read more by the Dyachenkos at some point, but I'm not sure if I want to read more in this series. By which I mean: it sounds like there are two more "Metamorphoses" books which are thematically related to this one, but feature different settings and characters, which to me is not a real series and not interesting -- what I liked about this book was the setting and the characters. Then there's a direct sequel, Vita Nostra. Работа над ошибками (which is getting translated in English as Assassin of Reality for some reason; the Russian title actually means "work on [one's] mistakes", so something like "Corrections" in a school context), but hm. I might check out that one, but I'm not encouraged seeing a lot of criticisms of it as a leass interesting retread of the first book.
(Random notes: I ended up transliterating the authors' names in Russian because that's what it said on my copy of the book, which is in Russian, but I hate that this kind of thing feels like a political choice now. Also, I didn't realize the Dyachenkos lived in California. I even found something that said they lived in San Francisco, but either that was not for very long or not SF itself (people say "San Francisco" when they mean other parts of the Bay Area) or just not the case -- it seems like they were actually in SoCal, at least most recently.)
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Oh, right, and I did remember to watch the BBC Ghosts s4 Christmas Special. It was cute, but I didn't find it as affecting as the first one, where I had liked meeting Mike's family and Alison singing carols with the ghosts. I did find Pat's family videos suitably heartwarming, Thomas's directorial depredations reasonably funny, and my favorite part, unsurprisingly I'm sure, was spoiler the Captain's turn as the fairy god-mother to Kitty's Cinderella, following his peptalk to Kitty.
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Challenge #4: If you got the opportunity to add one thing to the canon of any of your fandoms, what would that be? Maybe there’s a character who didn’t get much of a backstory/storyline and you’d like to do something with them, maybe a show was axed too soon and you had thoughts on what could happen in a subsequent season, maybe there’s a new episode you’d like to have added. In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon.
I had to ponder this for a while, while reading through other people's response.
It was interesting to see how the answers went in several different directions -- some talking about things canon didn't do that they wanted it to, some linking to missing moments or fix-it fic they've written that addressed those gaps, some talking about headcanons. Well, I love talking about headcanons -- it's probably my favorite mode of engagement with fandoms I'm fannish about -- but upon reflection, I think the headcanons I'm both firmest and most interested in are ones that DON'T slot into canon -- like, crossover headcanons, fision headcanons, setting change AU headcanons -- X as a superhero/college professor/IN SPACE/with a daemon, Y born into the Planet of Hats structure of Z canon, etc. I think the fun of that for me, vs filling in canon, is that there isn't a "right" answer lurking somewhere out there, either in a possible future installment of canon or Word of God revelation or even just in the creator's head. I mean, having my headcanons contradicted is not a big deal, but it's just more satisfying to ponder something there definitely isn't a real answer to, for me. And then when it comes to actual fanworks, it seems like I'm never drawn to answering those kinds of questions either -- looking at my AO3 output, I'm either writing things that are just "here's another adventure that extends canon along a familiar trajectory" or character exploration via poem, is how it works out.
So then I guess I have to limit myself to a "thing I wish canon would have done better" kind of answer. Which I certainly have for canons I'm ambivalent about or frustrated by, but it's rarer for me in fandom I deeply love. But there is one I'm sad about:
I adore the Vorkosigan Saga, and one of the things I really love is how it engages with the themes of family, parenthood, the relationship between children and parents, and additional generations. I find all the familial relationships the series explores really amazing -- Miles and Aral and Cordelia, of course, but also Miles and Count Piotr, Mark and the family he acquires, Ivan and Lady Alys, etc. And I realize that 30+ years is a long time to keep a series going (Shards of Honor = 1986, The Flowers of Vashnoi = 2018), and that one of the pitfalls for a long series with a large cast of beloved characters is that not everyone is going to get a satisfying arc in all respects. But I'm really sad that the chronologically-post-A Civil Campaign books are so sparse, jump around quite a lot, and in some cases are just not as good as the older books in the series (like, I'm glad we got Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, because even a meh Vorkosigan book is better than no Vorkosigan book at all, and I was very happy to hear from these characters again, but I don't think it's a very good novel, much as it pains me to say that about a book by one of my favorite authors). Because one thing I really wish we had gotten to see is the continuation of the themes of family, and overcoming your own trauma while struggling with the always very difficult (even with no personal trauma involved) task of raising children, for more of the characters. Like, we got a tiny bit of it with Miles, who I feel is actually the least interesting of the characters to get this for, partly because, whatever other shitty things he may have had to deal with in life, his parents were great, and partly because it does seem like Ekaterin is doing the lion's share of the parenting (not surprising, given the personalities involved, even leaving aside the patriarchal nature of Barrayar).
But what I really wanted to see was exploring how the characters with very complicated relationships with their own parents end up dealing with parenthood: Galeni, raising a half-Barrayaran/half-Komarran child; Gregor, ditto, and also an heir to the Empire, and also an inheritor of Serg's genes, however carefully scrubbed, I'm sure, but with the example of Aral and Cordelia; Ivan, who grew up without a father but with a very strong mother, and tried to keep the lowest profile possible. I feel like there's so much interesting stuff to explore here, and Bujold does family relationships so well, including complicated family relationships like Miles and Count Piotr, Elena and Bothari, etc. -- this would've been fascinating and well done! But, well, it's pretty clear that by the time LMB got to that part of the saga, she was ready to move on to things outside of this world, and interested in exploring other themes besides, not parenthood so much. Which is obviously her prerogative, and I'm grateful for the great relationship explorations we did get, but I can't help but feel sad about the ones we didn't.
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Challenge #5: In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom or like many people at the moment, fannishly adrift right now)
I try not to duplicate this from year to year, but it's hard to think of what new resources I've used this year... especially considering how scattered and unusual-for-me my fandoms have been.
Like, Sven's Sudoku Pad is AMAZING, and I've made a lot of use of KillerSudokuOnline's Sum Calculator (I think you have to have a KillerSudokuOnline puzzle open for the sum calculator to work, or at least that's how it works with my browsers), and have enjoyed BremSter's Sudoku Problems series as a kind of morning calisthenics. (Sudoku is TOO a fandom, but I was pretty surprised to discover this last year.)
And for Taskmaster, I spent many fun hours browsing both Jack Bernhardt's spreadsheet and the extensive Taskmaster wiki, and gleaning extra knowledge from The Podcast, but I'm sure everyone interested already knows about all those things.
But I can't think of what other fannish resources I used this year, other than, like, the ones everyone knows, like Google Books to search for quotes, TV Tropes, dafont.com as the source of fonts for graphics, etc.
Oh! browsing other answers to the challenge reminded me of one I never really think of as a separate "resource" but used just today: Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything-s) with authors, which tend to have a wealth of information -- both Word of God type info about canon, which can be useful, and stuff about the author's creative process, influences, plans for things in sequels, etc. Ones I've perused happily in the past: Ada Palmer (2021) -- she's done a number of these, so there are older ones, too; Steven Brust (2015); Patrick Rothfuss (2015), and many others. I remembered about this as a resource because I just used it today to read up on Vita Nostra in translation.
And a running list of neat-looking links picked up from browsing other people's posts this year:
- https://www.preceden.com/ -- timelines and Gantt charts that can be used for story planning
- https://breezewiki.com/ -- clean version of fandom wiki pages
- graphics resources linked by kingstoken
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A wild book post appears!
20. Everina Maxwell, Ocean's Echo -- I had a weird trajectory with this book. I got a copy of the ARC back in October, I think, and started buddy-reading it with cafemassolit, buoyed by Maxwell's description of this as "It’s not Captain Carrot x Moist von Lipwig but it’s not NOT that". And this is a just description! And I really love the not!Moist (Tennalhin Halkana) and all the shenanigans he gets into, almost reflexively. I also like the not!Carrot (Surit Yeni) with his implacable sense of decency, and his placid exterior belying an extremely clever mind and strong will, just a lot less flashy than Tennal's. I like the way their relationship develops at the start (more on this below), I like Tennal's relationships with everyone, which tend to be prickly and interesting, because of the kind of person he is, I like Surit's bureaucratic virtuosity (he is such a Hufflepuff Primary, Ravenclaw Secondary, it's lovely to see). Anyway, both leads are great, and I enjoyed both their POVs, and the two of them crashing together. But as the book wears on, there the worldbuilding elements start growing in prominence relative to the character stuff, and I cared much less about that part; honestly, once the serious spec-fic elements of this (beyond general space fleet stuff) kicked in, I got bored and wandered away for months.
See, the spec fic stuff the book is about is telepathic powers (powered by the Remnants that were introduced in Winter's Orbit), spoilers from here, how they relate to being able to navigate chaotic space, and telepathic sync between an "architect" (telepath who can impose their will on another, temporarily) and a "reader" (who can read off emotions/thoughts, and also navigate through chaotic space based on intuition). Readers are distrusted in this society, ostensibly because it's a thing that can be done sneakily, without a person's knowledge, unlike being written by an architect, but really because they were selected to be the scapegoats in a past civil war, which makes a lot more sense. Tennal is a reader, which his aunt feels is hurting his chances, so she concocts a scheme to basically turn him into an architect by forcing him to synch with an architect she then plans to have killed -- the foreshadowing of this was nicely done, and the reveal itself was very cool. Surit is the sacrificial Rank One architect (neither he nor Tennal know what the real plan is, of course), the child of an infamous "traitor" and thus very disposable. The part of the book where Tennal refuses to cooperate, after being Primed (drugged, basically) for a sync against his will, and then Surit refuses to cooperate, because he comes to realize that Tennal did not consent to the synch / was not really given the opportunity to refuse, even when Tennal, driven mad by the boredom of house arrest, tells him to do it -- is great! The part where the two of them, at Surit's instigation, FAKE being telepathically synched, is fabulous, my favorite part of the book -- there's all this glorious evolution from Tennal viewing Surit as an enemy and then an obstacle and then a fellow victim -- and then an ALLY and co-conspirator, there's the two of them having to trust each other to improvise, it's great. But then, for Reasons, as I knew had to happen, the two of them DO actually sync telepathically, and the part where they start merging into one being with weird powers who forgets to breathe is well done and all, but also I do not care. I would've said that I liked the Telepathic Bond trope -- I've written in in my own Magnum Opus, e.g. -- but I think for me the interesting thing about it is navigating around it -- how do you hide things from the person living inside your brain? -- which is not what this take was about, almost at all. So a great deal of time is spent on the detailed worldbuilding of what it means for these two people to be deeply psychically linked, and I only wanted them to become separate again so they could have interesting interpersonal dynamics instead of a mixed-up soup of selves inside their shared brains. For the same different priorities reasons, the climaxes where first Surit "reassembles" Tennal and then Tennal "reassembles" Surit didn't really work for me as climaxes -- they were happening in a milieu I just didn't care about enough. (I also found the stuff with navigating chaotic space, interestingly described as it was, similarly boring. It is clear that Maxwell cares more about Chaotic Space than I do, and about telepathic bonds in a very different way than I do. Alas, earwax.)
I also did not care about political shenanigans with Governor Oma, or the stuff with the Resolution at the end (I found the Resolution subplot pretty boring in Winter's Orbit as well). Really, the thing that worked for me about this was the personal stuff around Tennal -- his relationship with Surit, his relationship with his younger sister Zin, his relationship with his aunt (what can I say, me and my despots), his view of himself and overcoming his demons and self-loathing. I was definitely happy for Surit's POV of Tennal -- it was generally less exhausting than Tennal's own POV of himself -- but Surit's POV of pretty much all other things was not nearly as interesting to me, so all the stuff at the end, where they are separate, was also kind of a drag. As such, I was disappointed that there wasn't more Tennal/Surit in the book. Like I said in my end-of-year meme('s comments?) -- it's not like I require romance in my SFF, and I certainly don't require sex. But I think Winter's Orbit, and also the alternating POV structure, primed me to expect this to be more of a romance than it was. I mean, Tennal and Surit get together -- or, get to the point where they're going to get together -- but as a romance this wasn't satisfying. And the other stuff was fine, but it appears that I prefer the way Maxwell writes character interaction and romance to the way she writes worldbuilding, politics, and action -- which is a preference thing, I think; her worldbuilding and politics and action are solid -- and so the fact that this book was heavier on the latter than the former, relative to Winter's Orbit and even more so relative to Course of Honor, the AO3 version of Winter's Orbit, means that I liked it less. (And, as I wondered in the other post when chatting with qwentoozla, I wonder if this trajectory is a reflection of what Maxwell wants to write -- and the character/relationship focused stuff in the AO3 version was because that's what AO3 likes -- or if it's that she needed to up the worldbuilding and action relative to romance to have the books be taken seriously seriously as sci-fi. Or maybe, you know, her preferences have changed, but it does seem like a fairly monotonic trajectory, based on these three data points...)
In Winter's Orbit, I enjoyed the secondary characters. I also enjoyed them here -- Tennal's family (Zin and the aunt), the rankers Istara and Basavi (especially the banter between Tennal and Istara, developing from the fight the first time they met). But nobody except Tennal was a major standout.
Quotes:
Tennal to Surit: "I bet your academy teachers marked you as the cadet most likely to go out in a blaze of glory saving a ship full of kittens and senior officers' children."
"Behind that focus, Tennal didn't sense caution, or bafflement, or anything Tennal usually engendered. Instead there was a single glimpse of clockwork arranging itself around Tennal's quick-fire ideas, of a vast, immovable will bending itself to a purpose. [...] Something that could meet Tennal and not be knocked off course."
"The ex was married to two bankers now, and the three of them together still added up to less of an asshole than Tennal."
Tennal in captivity:
"Good morning," the captain said. "Is there an emergency?"
"I'm out of coffee," Tennal said.
Istara to Tennal: "I'm in. Can't wait to watch you fuck this up from close quarters."
Tennal: "You're welcome. Enjoy the show."
Surit: "every time he turned around, there was Tennal -- unpredictable and razoredged, crackling like the end of a live wire. [...] Tennal was a chaos event. Surit was drawn to it like a gravity well."
Surit at a party: "'Oh, that,' Surit said, instantly relaxing. He could have talked about traffic patterns all day. If he'd known you were allowed to talk about work at this kind of party, he would have seen the point of them sooner."
"He's been distracted by [...] the way Tennal turned everything else into background."
Surit, making a joke: "I got one hundred and three percent on my covert-break-in module. The examiner wanted to give me a prize after the test but couldn't find me to do it."
"He had always dealt with problems by making himself into a bigger problem."
Tennal to Oma: "Funny way of dealing with it. I'm personally considered a leading light in the field of maladaptive coping mechanisms, but it's amazing how I never managed to brainwash hundreds of people and take over the government."
"We have solved your situation for you," Tennal announced grandly.
"You haven't!" Zin said. "You absolutely haven't!"
"We have fucked up the situation," Tennal amended, just as grandly, "in a new and interesting way."
1. Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Vita Nostra -- so, I had read the first couple of pages of Vita Nostra when I first got a copy of the book (thanks again, bearshorty!), before anything spec-ficcy started happening -- I was enjoying the prose and reading in Russian, but then my ability to fiction broke again and I set it aside. And that was long enough ago that I completely forgot what the book was supposed to be about. So then cue the end-of-year book meme, which happened to coincide with me talking about Ponedelnik/Monday Begins on Saturday in addition to me mentioning starting but not finishing Vita Nostra, and a couple of people commented on that post about the book, and I went back to the it and spent my Sunday alone reading it pretty much the entire time, for reasons I can't necessarily explain -- although I do think that it is a book that benefits from being read straight through, inhabiting this liminal world it creates without coming up for air too much. (I was complaining to scytale, before diving back in, that it felt like a very long book. The English version appears to be reasonably sized -- 416 pages, according to Goodreads -- but the Russian edition is 576. English does tend to be a more compact language, and reading some stuff from the translator, it sounds like they consciously cut some stuff like nicknames and altered quotes for copyright law reasons, but I'm still a bit O.o at the discrepancy... But anyway.)
I went back and read bearshorty's and qwentoozla's write-ups, which I'd seen before and forgot, and, yeah -- the "magic school but it sucks" (Russian edition) story definitely makes one think of Novik's Scholomance (A Deadly Education) and Grossman's Brakebills (The Magicians) -- but mostly it made me think of them in the sense that it didn't feel much like them at all (well, like Brakebills a bit, certain sections of the first book). SPOILERS from here But quite to my surprise, the "magic school but it sucks" narrative it reminded me the most of was the Fulcrum in Jemisin's Broken Earth books -- it's not AS terrible, but it's the comparison that best matches both the ominous sense that both failure and success lead to bad outcomes and the weird mixture of cruelty and semblance of caring from authority figures whose power over the students is both absolute and unknown. I did not expect that AT ALL! Meanwhile, it's nothing like the Scholomance because the Scholomance isn't actually a magic school story, I maintain -- it's a fantasy story that happens to take place inside a building where young people learn magic, and I enjoyed the sequel much more once I accepted that. And the difference with Brakebills/The Magicians is quite interesting: there is actually a strong sense of similarity in the atmosphere where the work is just this side of impossibly hard, and awful things can happen to students because the things they are learning are very dangerous, and the students learning magic are profoundly transformed -- but I do think a very key difference is that the Brakebills students chose to be there, and that what's keeping them there is pride, ambition -- not, as in the case of the this book, fear, blackmail, and, in the case of Sasha's drive towards excellence, the desire to become good enough, strong enough, that she can take revenge (before she comes to the realization that once she reaches that point, she will not care about revenge, or see the need for it).
One really interesting to both the Fulcrum and the Scholomance, though, is this: they are both awful, brutal, worse than Torpa, where the students do, at least, get to have some fun university moments and mostly don't die. But both the Fulcrum and the Scholomance at least frame themselves as the lesser evil: Young orogenes in the Broken Earth world can manifest their powers to kill entire communities, if untrained, so it is imperative that they be trained (with the side goal of the Fulcrum being very visibly in control of the orogenes in the eyes of the stills, so they are left alone to manage them). Young magic users in Novik's world are essentially bait for mals, and while the math of the Scholomance is not great (and not fair), it is better than not having a place like the Scholomance at all, in aggregate. Which, these setups are not an excuse for brutality, either active or passibe, but they are attempts at solving immediate problems, addressing a real source of danger. Vita Nostra's setup is not doing that at all: untrained, these potential Words would presumably just live out their lives like average humans. The motivation for all this appears to be, what, pushing people to reach their full potential, to transcend their humanity and become something greater. Which -- and this is the reason I mentioned Ponedelnik in my first paragraph -- is the underpinning of Monday Begins on Saturday, too -- outgrowing your human limitations, interesting and vital work with like-minded people -- just much darker.
It did feel like a very Russian (Soviet or post-Soviet) approach to "magic school" -- you're going to study magic whether you want to or not, you can't get out voluntarily, you don't get any choice about the educational process, your area of specialization is whatever you get assigned, and everything is motivated by fear. Sasha even asks her teachers and curator why everything is being done through fear, why no-one just explains what they are doing, and they all have pat answers along the lines of "you wouldn't possibly understand at this stage of your development" -- which appears to be true, or at least Sasha accepts that as she goes along. And when she asks couldn't something other than fear be used as external motivation -- love or ambition, e.g. -- the answer is, nothing motivates as strongly as fear. That combination of using the bluntest but most powerful instrument in pursuit of a lofty, ineffable sort of goal -- that is so very there to me...
I found Sasha the protagonist both enjoyable to read about and quite relatable, at least in the first parts of the book -- bzyki otlichnika [hangups of a good student] and all that, but also, hm. That reserve of will which makes her dangerous when fueled with the skills she learns -- whatever happened with her roommates, whatever she did to the attackers on break, the fact that she hit Kostya when helping him study -- none of these are things I have done, but they are all things I could see myself doing in sufficiently fraught circumstances, so it resonated quite strongly. The other characters felt like vivid sketches to me, in relationship to Sasha -- the intimate and increasingly complicated relationship with her single mother, which felt really familiar; frightening but occasionally human Farit and teachers, the way humor and tragedy are mixed with the other students and Sasha's interactions with them -- but didn't stick with me as full-fledged characters. I did like "delovaya" [bustling] Oksana, though, Sasha's first year roommate, who always had food and was angrily washing dishes and was undeterred by the alcohol ban, and wish she'd been around more. I also thought the thing between Sasha and Egor was pretty well done -- he seems like a great guy, they share a traumatic but life-affirming experience, then she leaves him behind -- but Streh's explanation for the interaction between imperative and subjunctive (I think? some kind of irrealis anyway) tenses of verbs also made a lot of sense and seems very plausible for what actually happened between them.
A thing this book really nailed, via Sasha's POV, was this feeling of personal breakthrough after a tremendous amount of work in a pressure cooker environment. That was my favorite thing about The Magicians, and is a big part of why I like magic school narratives, whether they're set among primary school children in our world, like Harry Potter, or with older students in a secondary world, like Roke or Kingkiller Chronicles' Arcanum -- and Vita Nostra does that very well, maybe better than anything else I've read, because it's so inwardly focused and underexplained, showing nonsense resolving into glimpses of meaning, showing exercises building on each other, not monotonically, with slippage, and not easily, but hard-won forward motion, showing the mental space of someone approaching a difficult mental task from the position of knowing that they've succeeded in such things before. Oh, and also, how early on, Sasha is very happy to study math, which she never liked, because unlike the "specialty" training, which is reading nonsense, math makes sense. It's very well done. Another very well evoked thing, for me anyway, was the trippiness Sasha experiences with the moving doors and changing colors in her second year, and then the sense of "appropriating", subsuming other things in her third -- it all feels very vividly described, very grounded in a weird way that makes it work for me.
One of the things I found neat is that the word "magic" is never mentioned in this book. The college refers to the subject only as "spetsial'nost'" [specialty], the introductions are generic and vague. And when the students are trying to figure out what it is they are being forced to learn, there's guesses about cults and psychadelic drugs and zombiefication and other planets, but not magic as such. It feels appropriate, for the kind of book it is, to have an entire book about learning magic that never mentions the word magic or any of its synonyms.
Another thing, tangentially, though, is on the opposite end of that -- complete mundanity. As bearshorty mentioned in her writeup as well, I've never been to a Russian-type uni. I know a little bit about how they work from my parents' stories, and what I've gleaned from friends who did attend universities in Russia, but I think this is actually the first book I've read where a protagonist was navigating a Russian/Soviet uni system, so it was interesting just from that worldbuilding perspective, the "school" part besides the "magic" part. And it was also just nice to revisit a Russian setting, all the little details that feel very familiar to my pre-emigration life -- sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and pickles to be eaten on trains, buttermilk as anti-sunburn lotion, quotes from well-known Soviet children's books,
One thing that kept jumping out at me in Sasha's conversations with her teachers was how the shifting along the formal-to-intimate continuum of speech registers is used -- the ty/vy switches and the diminutive (Sahen'ka) - common use name (Sasha) - full first name (Alexandra) - surname (Samohina) switches (e.g. Sterh tends to use "vy" (formal, respectful) and "Sashen'ka" (intimate), Portnov and Farit tend to use "ty" dismissively until by the end they're using it more as a sign of equality) -- there's a lot of interesting stuff going on at that level, I feel, which I assume is either entirely missing or was much more difficult to render in the English translation. I'm not curious enough to read this in English, but it was interesting to note.
So I clearly have a lot of thoughts about this book, and it pulled me in in a way not a lot of books have done lately. Did I actually like it? I appreciate it, certainly, for the place it has in the literary conversation of magic school narratives -- it's doing some things that I want from a magic school narrative exceptionally well, and is unique in some interesting respects (vs other things I've read, anyway). I can't say I enjoyed spending time inside this book... I appreciated Sasha's POV throughout, but she is terrified and/or lost so much of the time, and, like, I felt like I shouldn't care about anyone else too deeply because that was just going to end badly (which is consistent with how things operate within this world, so well done evoking that).
I also don't really get/like the ending. Looking at what people who've read it say about the sequel, it sounds like maybe it is intentionally ambiguous? sequel spoilers I read the ending as Sasha passing the exam because she did "reverberate" (I like this translation choice!), after rejecting fear, and also the good things happening with her family -- baby Valya's fever breaking and Valentin coming back -- imply a positive outcome, but it sounds like the sequel has it so that Sasha actually failed the exam and gets to repeat the Torpa experience? Which, I don't think I can hold that against this book, but I still don't like. /sequel spoilers Anyway, sequel stuff aside, I don't find the ending all that satisfying anyway. It feels right that even in this final exam Sasha ends up doing her own thing, going beyond where the system wants her to go -- actually, in reviewing my highlights from early in the book, I was very pleased to find that this is something that was foreshadowed/consistent from Sasha's pre-Torpa life, with her attempting the "free response" essay question instead of one of the standard ones, "kak uchili" [the way you were taught], which her teacher tells her off for. But. Finding out at the very last moment she is even speshuler than previously speshuled -- this feels like a weird place to put that reveal, especially when I don't think the notion of Passwords had been introduced earlier at all. It also doesn't feel like there's any emotional payoff in Sasha's interpersonal relationships except with her mother/family, with whom she does get a moment, but I'm not even sure what that moment really means, because there's so little context for it. She has a sort of moment of understanding with her teachers, but what happens next feels like it undermines that -- but maybe that's intentional, and I guess that's OK. There is her last scene with Egor, but I don't understand what it means in the long term -- did she help him pass the exam (with Streh's help) or does that get overwritten later, or does he just fail at the next step anyway without Sasha's intervention? I'm OK with the lack of closure with Kostya, because "lack of closure" seemed to be their whole thing, but on top of everything else being so nebulous, it's just one more ambiguous thing. And it would've been nice to have some kind of final closure with Liza, too; I know they had their reconciliation of sorts in part 2, but she was such a major part of the first book, it seems weird, narratively, to leave her behind, even though Sasha leaving people behind is basically the theme of this. I guess I was hoping for something more definitive for the ending, and whatever this was, it wasn't that.
Quotes:
re: the handsome young PE teacher: "Показывал как проходят сухожилья, как расположены мышцы -- сперва на плакате, потом на живой натуре. Натура массово требовала новых и новых объяснений."
re: Sasha trying to tutor Kostya: "Костя не понимал и от отчаяния лез целоваться."
Denis on getting a passing grade on his second try: "'Напюсь в подворотне и буду валятся в канаве.' И он улыбнулся, как Золушка при мысли о королевском бале."
"Она [...] перекачивала Егору, будто донор, свою уверенность и волю к борьбе."
I was sufficiently impressed with the book that I'd like to read more by the Dyachenkos at some point, but I'm not sure if I want to read more in this series. By which I mean: it sounds like there are two more "Metamorphoses" books which are thematically related to this one, but feature different settings and characters, which to me is not a real series and not interesting -- what I liked about this book was the setting and the characters. Then there's a direct sequel, Vita Nostra. Работа над ошибками (which is getting translated in English as Assassin of Reality for some reason; the Russian title actually means "work on [one's] mistakes", so something like "Corrections" in a school context), but hm. I might check out that one, but I'm not encouraged seeing a lot of criticisms of it as a leass interesting retread of the first book.
(Random notes: I ended up transliterating the authors' names in Russian because that's what it said on my copy of the book, which is in Russian, but I hate that this kind of thing feels like a political choice now. Also, I didn't realize the Dyachenkos lived in California. I even found something that said they lived in San Francisco, but either that was not for very long or not SF itself (people say "San Francisco" when they mean other parts of the Bay Area) or just not the case -- it seems like they were actually in SoCal, at least most recently.)
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Oh, right, and I did remember to watch the BBC Ghosts s4 Christmas Special. It was cute, but I didn't find it as affecting as the first one, where I had liked meeting Mike's family and Alison singing carols with the ghosts. I did find Pat's family videos suitably heartwarming, Thomas's directorial depredations reasonably funny, and my favorite part, unsurprisingly I'm sure, was spoiler the Captain's turn as the fairy god-mother to Kitty's Cinderella, following his peptalk to Kitty.
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Challenge #4: If you got the opportunity to add one thing to the canon of any of your fandoms, what would that be? Maybe there’s a character who didn’t get much of a backstory/storyline and you’d like to do something with them, maybe a show was axed too soon and you had thoughts on what could happen in a subsequent season, maybe there’s a new episode you’d like to have added. In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon.
I had to ponder this for a while, while reading through other people's response.
It was interesting to see how the answers went in several different directions -- some talking about things canon didn't do that they wanted it to, some linking to missing moments or fix-it fic they've written that addressed those gaps, some talking about headcanons. Well, I love talking about headcanons -- it's probably my favorite mode of engagement with fandoms I'm fannish about -- but upon reflection, I think the headcanons I'm both firmest and most interested in are ones that DON'T slot into canon -- like, crossover headcanons, fision headcanons, setting change AU headcanons -- X as a superhero/college professor/IN SPACE/with a daemon, Y born into the Planet of Hats structure of Z canon, etc. I think the fun of that for me, vs filling in canon, is that there isn't a "right" answer lurking somewhere out there, either in a possible future installment of canon or Word of God revelation or even just in the creator's head. I mean, having my headcanons contradicted is not a big deal, but it's just more satisfying to ponder something there definitely isn't a real answer to, for me. And then when it comes to actual fanworks, it seems like I'm never drawn to answering those kinds of questions either -- looking at my AO3 output, I'm either writing things that are just "here's another adventure that extends canon along a familiar trajectory" or character exploration via poem, is how it works out.
So then I guess I have to limit myself to a "thing I wish canon would have done better" kind of answer. Which I certainly have for canons I'm ambivalent about or frustrated by, but it's rarer for me in fandom I deeply love. But there is one I'm sad about:
I adore the Vorkosigan Saga, and one of the things I really love is how it engages with the themes of family, parenthood, the relationship between children and parents, and additional generations. I find all the familial relationships the series explores really amazing -- Miles and Aral and Cordelia, of course, but also Miles and Count Piotr, Mark and the family he acquires, Ivan and Lady Alys, etc. And I realize that 30+ years is a long time to keep a series going (Shards of Honor = 1986, The Flowers of Vashnoi = 2018), and that one of the pitfalls for a long series with a large cast of beloved characters is that not everyone is going to get a satisfying arc in all respects. But I'm really sad that the chronologically-post-A Civil Campaign books are so sparse, jump around quite a lot, and in some cases are just not as good as the older books in the series (like, I'm glad we got Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, because even a meh Vorkosigan book is better than no Vorkosigan book at all, and I was very happy to hear from these characters again, but I don't think it's a very good novel, much as it pains me to say that about a book by one of my favorite authors). Because one thing I really wish we had gotten to see is the continuation of the themes of family, and overcoming your own trauma while struggling with the always very difficult (even with no personal trauma involved) task of raising children, for more of the characters. Like, we got a tiny bit of it with Miles, who I feel is actually the least interesting of the characters to get this for, partly because, whatever other shitty things he may have had to deal with in life, his parents were great, and partly because it does seem like Ekaterin is doing the lion's share of the parenting (not surprising, given the personalities involved, even leaving aside the patriarchal nature of Barrayar).
But what I really wanted to see was exploring how the characters with very complicated relationships with their own parents end up dealing with parenthood: Galeni, raising a half-Barrayaran/half-Komarran child; Gregor, ditto, and also an heir to the Empire, and also an inheritor of Serg's genes, however carefully scrubbed, I'm sure, but with the example of Aral and Cordelia; Ivan, who grew up without a father but with a very strong mother, and tried to keep the lowest profile possible. I feel like there's so much interesting stuff to explore here, and Bujold does family relationships so well, including complicated family relationships like Miles and Count Piotr, Elena and Bothari, etc. -- this would've been fascinating and well done! But, well, it's pretty clear that by the time LMB got to that part of the saga, she was ready to move on to things outside of this world, and interested in exploring other themes besides, not parenthood so much. Which is obviously her prerogative, and I'm grateful for the great relationship explorations we did get, but I can't help but feel sad about the ones we didn't.
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Challenge #5: In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom or like many people at the moment, fannishly adrift right now)
I try not to duplicate this from year to year, but it's hard to think of what new resources I've used this year... especially considering how scattered and unusual-for-me my fandoms have been.
Like, Sven's Sudoku Pad is AMAZING, and I've made a lot of use of KillerSudokuOnline's Sum Calculator (I think you have to have a KillerSudokuOnline puzzle open for the sum calculator to work, or at least that's how it works with my browsers), and have enjoyed BremSter's Sudoku Problems series as a kind of morning calisthenics. (Sudoku is TOO a fandom, but I was pretty surprised to discover this last year.)
And for Taskmaster, I spent many fun hours browsing both Jack Bernhardt's spreadsheet and the extensive Taskmaster wiki, and gleaning extra knowledge from The Podcast, but I'm sure everyone interested already knows about all those things.
But I can't think of what other fannish resources I used this year, other than, like, the ones everyone knows, like Google Books to search for quotes, TV Tropes, dafont.com as the source of fonts for graphics, etc.
Oh! browsing other answers to the challenge reminded me of one I never really think of as a separate "resource" but used just today: Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything-s) with authors, which tend to have a wealth of information -- both Word of God type info about canon, which can be useful, and stuff about the author's creative process, influences, plans for things in sequels, etc. Ones I've perused happily in the past: Ada Palmer (2021) -- she's done a number of these, so there are older ones, too; Steven Brust (2015); Patrick Rothfuss (2015), and many others. I remembered about this as a resource because I just used it today to read up on Vita Nostra in translation.
And a running list of neat-looking links picked up from browsing other people's posts this year:
- https://www.preceden.com/ -- timelines and Gantt charts that can be used for story planning
- https://breezewiki.com/ -- clean version of fandom wiki pages
- graphics resources linked by kingstoken