Fiction and Beforeigners
Beforeigners is an HBO show set in Norway, 7 years after people from earlier time periods started appearing in numbers. Meret turned me on to it and it is amazing. Not only are there a ton of witty details about what life would be like, it also has a charismatic lead and some interesting things to say both about (1) immigration/anti-immigrant sentiment and (2) how people get inured to previously unbelievable and you-would-have-thought-intolerable situations, which has obvious relevance to the current situation. People are arriving from a thousand years ago! Ugh, is that still happening? The female lead was a Viking (but we don't use that term any more) shieldmaiden, and warriors aren't supposed to become police officers, so she just told them she was a farmwife, and they had no idea how to evaluate that claim so they believed her. Does have police work, but not US police work, so I hope it's tolerable?
My daughter and I also powered through the new She-Ra, which was great (though I think I still like Steven Universe better). Next up: new season of Lucifer, then probably Legend of Korra.
Veronica Roth, The Chosen Ones: Roth chooses an unpleasant but relatively effective way to introduce Sloane, the unfriendliest of five saviors of humanity (they defeated the Dark One who brought magic to Earth and slaughtered thousands): by having a misogynist journalist write about how much he wants to fuck her to take her off her high horse. The saving the world happened when they were teens, as did the associated trauma; though Sloane’s partner Matt-the leader-wants to get over it, Sloane isn’t with that program. When three of the Chosen are torn away from their Earth to another world that also needs saviors, she finds that she might not want to be the hero at all.
K.M. Szpara, Docile: With the tagline “there is no consent under capitalism,” this slavefic is pretty clear about what it’s doing, though it’s up to the reader how much that is consistent with wanting a happy ending for the main pairing. Alex is the heir to Bishop Industries, which makes Dociline-the drug given to slaves so that they don’t care or remember what happens to them-and is developing a new version that is supposed to leave them, somehow, with more “creativity.” Elisha is his new slave, in an America that has (1) readopted slavery for debt and (2) made debt heritable to ensure that slaves continue to be supplied. In theory slaves can either choose or refuse Dociline and have a couple of other “rights,” and the narrative even suggests those rights are mostly respected. Elisha refuses Dociline, which causes Alex great humiliation, so he decides to train Elisha using ordinary psychological (torture) techniques, which are particularly effective given the societal narrative that this all happened with Elisha’s consent since Elisha “voluntarily” sold himself into slavery to pay off his parents’ debt and make sure that his sister didn’t have to do so. If h/c is your thing, this might well work for you-a lot of the novel is Elisha’s recovery from what happened to him-but be aware that Alex starts off assuming that Elisha is lying when he says his mother has permanent damage from her years on Dociline; inflicts serious punishments on Elisha in order to train him to be a better slave; and only slightly becomes a better person when he sees how suffering affects someone he loves, which is kind of par for the romance formula.
T. Kingfisher, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking: Mona, a fourteen-year-old orphan living with her aunt and uncle at their bakery, has minor magic: she’s good with bread (and, as it turns out, dough and sourdough starter). When she finds a dead body in the bakery one morning and is accused of the murder by the Duchess’s anti-magic councilor, she’s swept up into a larger world of treachery and threatened invasion. It’s a good adventure, though apparently too dark for Kingfisher’s alter ego, children’s book author Ursula Vernon.
Stephen King, If It Bleeds: Shortish stories, including a new Holly Gibney story in which she goes after a slightly different kind of inherent evil preying on the suffering of the human race (classic King), though the first story-in which a young man continues to call the cellphone of his deceased older friend, with disturbing results-is the best and creepiest. There’s also a tripartite story about the life of one individual as having an entire world in it, and a writer-makes-devil’s-bargain-to-finish-book story.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction 2019, ed. Jonathan Strahan. A high-quality collection with a number of stories I’d encountered elsewhere. Inequality, climate collapse/apocalypse, and even online trolling show up in multiple stories. Suzanne Palmer’s The Painter of Trees is probably the bleakest (through much competition) of the apocalypse/species wipeout stories, about a few enhanced beings overseeing the death of the last of another intelligent species whose planet they’ve colonized. Ted Chiang has a short story that only manages to sketch out his usual depths. Alec Nevala-Lee has a good story about an explorer robot trying to find its way home. There’s also a useful introductory essay and list of recommended reading.
Tasha Suri, Empire of Sand: Mehr is the half-Amrithi daughter of the Empire’s regional governor, and somewhat insulated from the prejudice against Amrithi because of it. But when she reveals her powers to interact with the daiva and the storms according to ancient Amrithi lore, she’s snatched up by the religious authorities and forced into a marriage with another Amrithi; their powers turn out to be important to the maintenance of the empire. It seems odd for leaders encourage the slaughter of the people necessary to the preservation of the state, in numbers significant enough to threaten their viability-but it’s hard to deny that it’s plausible. As for the forced marriage: the partners don’t want to hurt or force each other; there is no explicit sex, and no sex until they know and love each other. It was fine but I’m not sure I’ll read more in the series; if you like fantasy and dilemmas of choice under constraint you might enjoy it.
Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow: Collection of stories from anthologies she’s edited. She’s done so many and selected enough of a variety here that it’s hard to say there’s any theme, though she does like horror, and there are a lot of different varieties of sexualized horror, including sexual abuse, especially in the first half. I enjoyed the last two, Shay Corsham Worsted (a sly horror/spy mashup) by Garth Nix, and Ted Chiang’s amazing Seventy-Two Letters.
Best of British Fantasy 2019: The first third of this is almost straight horror involving the creeping and also sudden destruction of the habitable earth, with some humor (Cthulhu mythos meets overworked and underpaid youth of today), which seems about the right fit for the moment (the intro was written in early 2020, with lockdowns just starting). E. Saxey contributes a nice solidarity-with-selkies story. Natalia Theodoriou has an eerie story about angels who fell and became pests.
K.B. Wagers, A Pale Light in the Black: Max Carmichael is a new lieutenant in the NeoG, the space equivalent of the Coast Guard, who went to it against the wishes of her wealthy, life-extension-tech-controlling family. She has to fit into her new crew, help them win the big competition against the other services, and also investigate a mystery that involves her family’s company and a bunch of dead bodies. Perfectly competent military-ish sf with an interesting focus on regular games as the real major occupation of big sectors of the military, and possibly no white cis male characters with names (sometimes it was hard to tell).
K.B. Wagers, After the Crown:Hail Bristol, former gunrunner turned Empress, has enemies foreign and domestic, as well as lots of loyal allies. There’s intrigue, betrayal, and visits to criminal enterprises Hail knew in her previous life. It’s a brisk enough adventure but didn’t hold me as well as the first book in the series.
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft:A family (minus the father killed by an intruder) return to the father's family home, where mysterious keys and a lady in a well are waiting for them. I watched the Netflix series which is in broad outlines similar, but the art didn't move me--I found everyone too blocky or too ratlike, with nothing in between--and the particular cruelties of deceiving and harming children were too much for me to continue.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
My daughter and I also powered through the new She-Ra, which was great (though I think I still like Steven Universe better). Next up: new season of Lucifer, then probably Legend of Korra.
Veronica Roth, The Chosen Ones: Roth chooses an unpleasant but relatively effective way to introduce Sloane, the unfriendliest of five saviors of humanity (they defeated the Dark One who brought magic to Earth and slaughtered thousands): by having a misogynist journalist write about how much he wants to fuck her to take her off her high horse. The saving the world happened when they were teens, as did the associated trauma; though Sloane’s partner Matt-the leader-wants to get over it, Sloane isn’t with that program. When three of the Chosen are torn away from their Earth to another world that also needs saviors, she finds that she might not want to be the hero at all.
K.M. Szpara, Docile: With the tagline “there is no consent under capitalism,” this slavefic is pretty clear about what it’s doing, though it’s up to the reader how much that is consistent with wanting a happy ending for the main pairing. Alex is the heir to Bishop Industries, which makes Dociline-the drug given to slaves so that they don’t care or remember what happens to them-and is developing a new version that is supposed to leave them, somehow, with more “creativity.” Elisha is his new slave, in an America that has (1) readopted slavery for debt and (2) made debt heritable to ensure that slaves continue to be supplied. In theory slaves can either choose or refuse Dociline and have a couple of other “rights,” and the narrative even suggests those rights are mostly respected. Elisha refuses Dociline, which causes Alex great humiliation, so he decides to train Elisha using ordinary psychological (torture) techniques, which are particularly effective given the societal narrative that this all happened with Elisha’s consent since Elisha “voluntarily” sold himself into slavery to pay off his parents’ debt and make sure that his sister didn’t have to do so. If h/c is your thing, this might well work for you-a lot of the novel is Elisha’s recovery from what happened to him-but be aware that Alex starts off assuming that Elisha is lying when he says his mother has permanent damage from her years on Dociline; inflicts serious punishments on Elisha in order to train him to be a better slave; and only slightly becomes a better person when he sees how suffering affects someone he loves, which is kind of par for the romance formula.
T. Kingfisher, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking: Mona, a fourteen-year-old orphan living with her aunt and uncle at their bakery, has minor magic: she’s good with bread (and, as it turns out, dough and sourdough starter). When she finds a dead body in the bakery one morning and is accused of the murder by the Duchess’s anti-magic councilor, she’s swept up into a larger world of treachery and threatened invasion. It’s a good adventure, though apparently too dark for Kingfisher’s alter ego, children’s book author Ursula Vernon.
Stephen King, If It Bleeds: Shortish stories, including a new Holly Gibney story in which she goes after a slightly different kind of inherent evil preying on the suffering of the human race (classic King), though the first story-in which a young man continues to call the cellphone of his deceased older friend, with disturbing results-is the best and creepiest. There’s also a tripartite story about the life of one individual as having an entire world in it, and a writer-makes-devil’s-bargain-to-finish-book story.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction 2019, ed. Jonathan Strahan. A high-quality collection with a number of stories I’d encountered elsewhere. Inequality, climate collapse/apocalypse, and even online trolling show up in multiple stories. Suzanne Palmer’s The Painter of Trees is probably the bleakest (through much competition) of the apocalypse/species wipeout stories, about a few enhanced beings overseeing the death of the last of another intelligent species whose planet they’ve colonized. Ted Chiang has a short story that only manages to sketch out his usual depths. Alec Nevala-Lee has a good story about an explorer robot trying to find its way home. There’s also a useful introductory essay and list of recommended reading.
Tasha Suri, Empire of Sand: Mehr is the half-Amrithi daughter of the Empire’s regional governor, and somewhat insulated from the prejudice against Amrithi because of it. But when she reveals her powers to interact with the daiva and the storms according to ancient Amrithi lore, she’s snatched up by the religious authorities and forced into a marriage with another Amrithi; their powers turn out to be important to the maintenance of the empire. It seems odd for leaders encourage the slaughter of the people necessary to the preservation of the state, in numbers significant enough to threaten their viability-but it’s hard to deny that it’s plausible. As for the forced marriage: the partners don’t want to hurt or force each other; there is no explicit sex, and no sex until they know and love each other. It was fine but I’m not sure I’ll read more in the series; if you like fantasy and dilemmas of choice under constraint you might enjoy it.
Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow: Collection of stories from anthologies she’s edited. She’s done so many and selected enough of a variety here that it’s hard to say there’s any theme, though she does like horror, and there are a lot of different varieties of sexualized horror, including sexual abuse, especially in the first half. I enjoyed the last two, Shay Corsham Worsted (a sly horror/spy mashup) by Garth Nix, and Ted Chiang’s amazing Seventy-Two Letters.
Best of British Fantasy 2019: The first third of this is almost straight horror involving the creeping and also sudden destruction of the habitable earth, with some humor (Cthulhu mythos meets overworked and underpaid youth of today), which seems about the right fit for the moment (the intro was written in early 2020, with lockdowns just starting). E. Saxey contributes a nice solidarity-with-selkies story. Natalia Theodoriou has an eerie story about angels who fell and became pests.
K.B. Wagers, A Pale Light in the Black: Max Carmichael is a new lieutenant in the NeoG, the space equivalent of the Coast Guard, who went to it against the wishes of her wealthy, life-extension-tech-controlling family. She has to fit into her new crew, help them win the big competition against the other services, and also investigate a mystery that involves her family’s company and a bunch of dead bodies. Perfectly competent military-ish sf with an interesting focus on regular games as the real major occupation of big sectors of the military, and possibly no white cis male characters with names (sometimes it was hard to tell).
K.B. Wagers, After the Crown:Hail Bristol, former gunrunner turned Empress, has enemies foreign and domestic, as well as lots of loyal allies. There’s intrigue, betrayal, and visits to criminal enterprises Hail knew in her previous life. It’s a brisk enough adventure but didn’t hold me as well as the first book in the series.
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft:A family (minus the father killed by an intruder) return to the father's family home, where mysterious keys and a lady in a well are waiting for them. I watched the Netflix series which is in broad outlines similar, but the art didn't move me--I found everyone too blocky or too ratlike, with nothing in between--and the particular cruelties of deceiving and harming children were too much for me to continue.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.