In which there are fluidities of sex, gender, time, and relative dimensions in space
- Reading, books 2015, 90.
89. Larque on the Wing, by Nancy Springer, 1994, is a novel about a woman experiencing a life-changing mid-life crisis. It's urban fantasy, but that term now implies things this story isn't, so perhaps it'd be better to describe it as magical realism, or a fairytale that's being told for the first time. It's interesting, especially because it's told from the perspective of a relatively (by British standards of the time) conservative middle-aged character who discovers she's queerly trans* and her enemy is the Cult of Niceness personified by her mother. There's unabashed anti-zyganism (pg158 and again at the end) with stereotypical anti-gypsy slurs (and a hint of anti-Black racism earlier in the book but no Black characters for it to appear through, unlike the anti-zyganism). Springer is generally authorially competent but this particular story lacks a novel-length plot. I imagine someone who needed to hear a story such as this could get a lot out of it but I'm guessing there are fewer people like that around now than when it was published in 1994 so unless you're rly into magical realist trans* stories there's probably a better book for you to read than this. Oddly, the secondhand copy I acquired had clearly never been read before. Imagine being a book that's been owned for twenty years but never read. (3/5)
90. Shada, by Douglas Adams and Gareth Roberts, is Roberts' reworking and novelisation of Adams' television scripts for a Doctor Who story about the fourth Doctor and second Romana. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, both as a light novel and as fanservice including all the requisite in-jokes. My personal favourites were a running in corridors pun (while being chased, the Doctor says he prefers the term "cul-de-sac" over "dead end", pg298), a polystyrene set gag ("the creature strode forward and ripped the door apart as with its powerful claws, as if it was made of polystyrene." \o/ pg240), and a somewhat less predictable Monty Python "It's..." moment (pg264). (4/5)
(pg97) There's a nod to British girls own culture when a geeky female character thinks about books on carbon dating: "[...] - she had read them all several times over under the covers in her tiny teenage bedroom, and hid them in public behind My Guy annuals - [...]". My Guy wasn't published until March 1978 and Shada is set in Autumn 1979 but I enjoyed the reference and am willing to pretend it was about Jackie magazine instead.
(pg49) "The Doctor coughed. 'When we were on the river we heard a strange sound, a sort of babble of inhuman voices.'
'Oh, just undergraduates talking to each other I expect,' said the Professor. 'I've tried to have it banned.' "
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