My Bookshelf of Unread Reproach still stretches lone and level, diminishing not one whit despite two weeks of holiday and, actually, a fair amount of reading. Mostly I'm going to have to get out of the habit of buying the damned things if I'm ever going to get on top of reading them. It's doomed, frankly. Given that I'm also busy packing up the several thousand volumes of my collection so that the Son of the Bride of the Revenge of the Army of Reconstruction can knock the wall out of my study next week, I'm forced to contemplate with lawks and gosh the extent to which the dratted things accumulate.
What I did read, however, was Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains, lent to me lo these many moons ago by![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
mac1235, and wimpishly avoided ever since because it looked a bit fierce and I had no brain. Richard Morgan is better known for his cyberpunky/military fictionish/sort-of-space-operatic trio of novels starting with Broken Angels, and featuring a plethora of body-hopping and a predominance of grit and grim. The Steel Remains is both similar in tone, and rather different. Should you ever require a loose approximation of the sword-and-sorcery genre to whack you between the eyes with a bloodstained hammer as a distraction from the fact that it just knifed you in the nuts, I thoroughly recommend this book. I mean, I don't even have the relevant equipment - I suspect the novel made me grow some just so it could rip them off and chew them with its iron teeth. It doesn't re-invent or even invert the classic fantasy tropes so much as it bloodily disembowels them.
I loved this book for the way in which it apparently starts halfway through an epic trilogy, with acres of invasion, warfare and politicking as a backstory you have to construct for yourself, and whose significance shifts and twists with every new character who contributes to it. Its heroes are postmodern, retired, embittered and unexpected - unexpectedly gay, for a start, and in an intolerant world, which does some amazing things to the heroic stereotype. You could say it was Tolkienesque in some ways, if Tolkien elves were mad and dark and twisted and given to savage sex with mortals, and if their fey other-realm lived in the bloodshot corner of your eye. It's probably more Robert E. Howard, only nastier, more decadent and far more intelligent, its sword-wielding heroes damaged, brutal and foul-mouthed, and horribly aware that they fought and survived only to find themselves victorious and empty.
Absences permeate this book: not just the absence of meaning for the characters, but the lost powers of the older civilisation who simply up and left, the terrifying other races who tried to invade and were thrown back at horrible cost, and the quick, pitiless degeneration into corruption and decadence of the civilisations for whom these heroes fought. These are warriors who hate war, who have come to realise that it's endless and meaningless and inevitable and necessary and that they're terribly, terribly good at it.
All of this makes it sound like a dark and twisted read, but while it is, it's also enjoyable, in a weird sort of way - real, satisfying, gripping, the first in a projected series but perfectly able to stand alone as a gut-punch read. Above all, this book confronts you with the sickening realisation, deep in your entrails, that you'll never have to fight anything as bad as the thing you have the potential to become.
What I did read, however, was Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains, lent to me lo these many moons ago by
mac1235, and wimpishly avoided ever since because it looked a bit fierce and I had no brain. Richard Morgan is better known for his cyberpunky/military fictionish/sort-of-space-operatic trio of novels starting with Broken Angels, and featuring a plethora of body-hopping and a predominance of grit and grim. The Steel Remains is both similar in tone, and rather different. Should you ever require a loose approximation of the sword-and-sorcery genre to whack you between the eyes with a bloodstained hammer as a distraction from the fact that it just knifed you in the nuts, I thoroughly recommend this book. I mean, I don't even have the relevant equipment - I suspect the novel made me grow some just so it could rip them off and chew them with its iron teeth. It doesn't re-invent or even invert the classic fantasy tropes so much as it bloodily disembowels them.I loved this book for the way in which it apparently starts halfway through an epic trilogy, with acres of invasion, warfare and politicking as a backstory you have to construct for yourself, and whose significance shifts and twists with every new character who contributes to it. Its heroes are postmodern, retired, embittered and unexpected - unexpectedly gay, for a start, and in an intolerant world, which does some amazing things to the heroic stereotype. You could say it was Tolkienesque in some ways, if Tolkien elves were mad and dark and twisted and given to savage sex with mortals, and if their fey other-realm lived in the bloodshot corner of your eye. It's probably more Robert E. Howard, only nastier, more decadent and far more intelligent, its sword-wielding heroes damaged, brutal and foul-mouthed, and horribly aware that they fought and survived only to find themselves victorious and empty.
Absences permeate this book: not just the absence of meaning for the characters, but the lost powers of the older civilisation who simply up and left, the terrifying other races who tried to invade and were thrown back at horrible cost, and the quick, pitiless degeneration into corruption and decadence of the civilisations for whom these heroes fought. These are warriors who hate war, who have come to realise that it's endless and meaningless and inevitable and necessary and that they're terribly, terribly good at it.
All of this makes it sound like a dark and twisted read, but while it is, it's also enjoyable, in a weird sort of way - real, satisfying, gripping, the first in a projected series but perfectly able to stand alone as a gut-punch read. Above all, this book confronts you with the sickening realisation, deep in your entrails, that you'll never have to fight anything as bad as the thing you have the potential to become.
- Currently feeling:
impressed - Currently listening to:Postal Service, Give Up
Shopping this morning, I put four bags of pecan nuts1 onto the till counter, and noticed that the woman had only rung up three of them. When I gently pointed out that in fact I owed her another R18.50 (and, ye gods, when did pecan nuts shoot up in price? memo to self, plant tree) she looked at me as though I was a particularly insane three-headed alien waving my twelve arms and spouting gibberish in Esperanto. She then rang up the extra item after triple- and quadruple-checking that this was actually what I meant, as though she couldn't quite believe it. When I'd paid she handed over my receipt with a sort of grudgingly suspicious thank-you for pointing out the error.
This weirds me out. We live in a world where greed and chicanery, on a scale from petty to epic and world-destroying, are the norm - to the extent where a moment's deliberate honesty actually brings the system grinding momentarily to a halt while the act is checked for hidden pitfalls, since if it's not a scam in itself, it's a self-destructive weakness worthy only of contempt. The newspaper billboards this morning were full of a new phishing scam targeting South Africans and based around World Cup tickets. Last week in the supermarket they'd just caught some poor woman attempting to shoplift an entire bag of cheese, twenty or thirty items. They caught her because the shoplifting is enough of an endemic problem that they have undercover security people pretending to be shoppers wandering around the store.
I don't actually like most of the human race very much just now. I think we've lost the plot. Capitalism and its ethos of it's-actually-virtuous-to-grab-for-yours
I'm going to bed now, my head hurts. On the upside, the new Kelly Link is dynamite, and makes me realise there may be an excuse for the human race after all.
1 Promised jo&stv carrot cake.
This weirds me out. We live in a world where greed and chicanery, on a scale from petty to epic and world-destroying, are the norm - to the extent where a moment's deliberate honesty actually brings the system grinding momentarily to a halt while the act is checked for hidden pitfalls, since if it's not a scam in itself, it's a self-destructive weakness worthy only of contempt. The newspaper billboards this morning were full of a new phishing scam targeting South Africans and based around World Cup tickets. Last week in the supermarket they'd just caught some poor woman attempting to shoplift an entire bag of cheese, twenty or thirty items. They caught her because the shoplifting is enough of an endemic problem that they have undercover security people pretending to be shoppers wandering around the store.
I don't actually like most of the human race very much just now. I think we've lost the plot. Capitalism and its ethos of it's-actually-virtuous-to-grab-for-yours
I'm going to bed now, my head hurts. On the upside, the new Kelly Link is dynamite, and makes me realise there may be an excuse for the human race after all.
1 Promised jo&stv carrot cake.
- Currently feeling:
depressed - Currently listening to:Big Wreck
Following a vague recommendation from someone-or-other, I completely forget who, I've spent chunks of the last few weeks scientifically investigating the works of Tamora Pierce. Pierce is a writer of young adult fantasy, and I was interested in her because she does some quite deliberate things with feminist themes and strong women negotiating medieval, male-dominated societies. It's been a slightly ambivalent reading experience. She's easy to read, and I find myself mentally classing her stories with the Anne McCaffrey Dragonsinger ones in terms of their tendency towards wish-fulfilment and cute-creature-hugging; I also worry a little about a potentially slightly facile feminism. Nonetheless I'm left overall with a strong sense that her Tortall series is a worthwhile project that does something necessary in terms of role models for teenage girls. The first Tortall series follows Alanna, who wants to train as a knight but has to disguise herself as a boy to do so. The disguised-as-a-boy bit is not treated realistically at all: young Alan should have been discovered posthaste and probably raped. But the urgency of the girl's need to fulfil a role not prescribed for her by her society is very apparent, and you end up rooting for her throughout. It's clearly an early work; the book's writing is a bit halting at times (she definitely gets better over time) and the magic/fighting combination is a little too idealised. The subsequent series which focuses on Keladry, the first girl to actually train openly as a knight, is stronger, more straightforwardly mundane and far more realistic as well as better written.
Good Things: solid detail in fighting, war, tactics (I am so an SCA geek); training is hard work, particularly for girls trying to overcome the strength deficit compared to boys. Prejudice against girls fighting. Page hazing rituals. Social awareness: the feudal system's privilege is neatly deconstructed in Keladry's story. Good teaching. Realistic teen romance! ye gods, how rare is it for teens in y.a. books to (a) play around with sex (b) sensibly (c) in a valid emotional context and (d) with a shifting series of partners, crushes and relationships. Death to the One Troo Love! JK Rowling's bloody saccharine Epilogue, take that!
Bad Things: clunky writing at times, narrative hiccups, falters and rushes. Slightly Shakespearian gender-swapping unrealisms. Too much cutesy power, too many cutesy people, not quite enough grey between heroes and villains. Bloody magically-enhanced animal deus ex machinas, although I can completely see these appealing to the teen girl demographic.
In completely another area of the young-girl-protagonist spectrum, Cathrynne M. Valente has posted the final chapter of her wonderful fairy tale, the one with September and the leopard and the wyverary A-through-L. And the soap golem. Baumish. Nesbitesque. Thurberoid. Other good things, including unexpected and off-beat and occasionally very cruel. Definitely well worth a read, particularly now that the whole thing's up.
- Currently feeling:
analytic - Currently listening to:Pet Shop Boys
Well, that was pretty awful. The older I get, the worse I handle late nights (and, it has to be said, the Demon Drink). Becoming horizontal at about 11pm after a particularly vociferous closing session to Neil's game (we won!), I thereafter spent several frustrating hours pursuing a small, blinking, bi-coloured light around the walls of my room at about head-height. Then, as hypnagogic hallucination gave way to actual dream, I sat through a dreary and interminable faculty selection committee where, despite the fact that I was actually one of the candidates, I had to watch all the rest being interviewed. No-one on the committee would explain why this was necessary, merely looking knowing and making off-hand remarks about how the candidates weren't actually the candidates, anyway. In the middle of it all the Dean's secretary, prompted by an incomprehensible crisis of some sort and acting on a direct instruction from the Dean, hustled me off to catch a plane to Bombay. I still don't know why. I am, however, once more a little frayed.
In an effort to inject some slightly more positive energy into the day, herewith a list of Things I Have Recently Enjoyed.
In an effort to inject some slightly more positive energy into the day, herewith a list of Things I Have Recently Enjoyed.
- The new Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. I spent Monday evening ensconced on the sofa with the Hobbit, chortling at intervals. Terry Pratchett is still very much Terry Pratchett, although I found the book a little scattered and over-busy in its themes and sub-plots: I suspect we're seeing actually a very good writer coming up against the slightly over-simplified limitations of his genre, and being driven to complicate them. The result is a bit cluttered, but the characters are as always warmly human, the digs at both football and academia are very happy-making, and the issues being explored (prejudice, mostly) are real and sharply pointed.
- Supernatural. About halfway through the first season: I am somewhat charmed by this series even though its monster-of-the-weekishness is not the only thing it's ripped off from the X-Files. (I swear you could do a direct episode correlation chart). Like the X-Files, it works because of the dynamic between its central characters, who are rather nicely-drawn brothers with a fairly realistic array of tensions, affections and differences. Also, extended road-trip. The actual working-out of the Supernatural Dingus Du Jour is not about reality at all, and I get a bit miffed about lack of consequences such as arrest, but it's a reasonably endearing watch.
- Buffy Season 9, i.e. the comics. Joss lets loose without budget constraints, leading to Giant!Dawn, Fray crossovers and whole episodes inside someone's supernatural head. I'm finding the artwork a bit variable - love some versions of the characters, hate others - but the plots are interesting and compelling, and it's a lot of fun to watch the characters develop post-Sunnydale. Buffy is considerably less annoying, too.
- smoczek's fajitas. Yum.
- Currently feeling:
undead undead undead
I'm subscribed to the IT mailing list of my Cherished Institution, mostly because there's a sort of mournful satisfaction in finally receiving the mail which tells you that you haven't had internet for two days on account of a virus/a DoS attack/that worm that targets promiscuous student swappage of memory sticks/an explosion in the server room/the giant squid attack on the undersea cable. Today the notification was of a routine electrical power-down in one of the buildings over the weekend, ostensibly because "A new supply cable needs to be pulled in and livened up." I am fascinated by the word choice. Do you think this is inept use of vocab, or actual technical terms? do electrical engineering types indeed talk about "livening up" a cable when it's connected? It's lovely word choice in some ways because it sounds energetically physical.
I think everymoment recommended M.T. Anderson's feed to me, and I spent a couple of hours yesterday imbibing it in a single, gulping inhale while flat on my back on the sofa (Sid has been all rampageous, with enthusiastic assistance from glandular fever resurgence; I couldn't look at a computer screen without active nausea until about 3pm yesterday and was feeble and spaced enough not to actually feel guilty that I wasn't at work). It's a damned good book, a sort of dystopian near-future young adult thing that's surprisingly dark and real in its depiction of teen relationships and concerns. Mostly, though, I was blown away by the writer's ability to capture not only the delirious speed and flickering change of a data feed plugged straight into your brain, but use of that data by the pervasive, iniquitous, seductive power of corporate consumerism. It's not a cheerful book, despite its hip surface and moments of humour: it's a tragedy, a meditation on the power of consumerism to pervade, to betray and to diminish its participants to a level of unthinking, oblivious naivety which presents itself as pathos rather than culpability. These kids struggle only feebly towards knowledge, context or understanding of either themselves or the rape being perpetrated on their world by the corporate interests which lull them with ownership. The fate of the one main character is tragic because it simply depicts, more quickly and obviously, the fate which awaits them all as capitalism, blindly grabbing, destroys them all. It's an absorbing, terrifying, slightly harrowing read that I wholeheartedly recommend.
Middleman gave us "The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation", last night, an episode tragically low in Goofy Middlemisms, although points for "Bram Stoker's widow!". Suitable vampire references litter the thing, but only this series can entwine Vlad the Impaler with sinister ventriloquists' models in one episode, leading to the interchange which neatly encapsulates the episode:
The Middleman: Dubbie, did he just turn into a bat puppet?
Wendy: Man, I don't even have an opinion.
This show, how much it is loved. By me. And, hopefully, after all these carefully-displayed gems, by most of you lot too.
I think everymoment recommended M.T. Anderson's feed to me, and I spent a couple of hours yesterday imbibing it in a single, gulping inhale while flat on my back on the sofa (Sid has been all rampageous, with enthusiastic assistance from glandular fever resurgence; I couldn't look at a computer screen without active nausea until about 3pm yesterday and was feeble and spaced enough not to actually feel guilty that I wasn't at work). It's a damned good book, a sort of dystopian near-future young adult thing that's surprisingly dark and real in its depiction of teen relationships and concerns. Mostly, though, I was blown away by the writer's ability to capture not only the delirious speed and flickering change of a data feed plugged straight into your brain, but use of that data by the pervasive, iniquitous, seductive power of corporate consumerism. It's not a cheerful book, despite its hip surface and moments of humour: it's a tragedy, a meditation on the power of consumerism to pervade, to betray and to diminish its participants to a level of unthinking, oblivious naivety which presents itself as pathos rather than culpability. These kids struggle only feebly towards knowledge, context or understanding of either themselves or the rape being perpetrated on their world by the corporate interests which lull them with ownership. The fate of the one main character is tragic because it simply depicts, more quickly and obviously, the fate which awaits them all as capitalism, blindly grabbing, destroys them all. It's an absorbing, terrifying, slightly harrowing read that I wholeheartedly recommend.Middleman gave us "The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation", last night, an episode tragically low in Goofy Middlemisms, although points for "Bram Stoker's widow!". Suitable vampire references litter the thing, but only this series can entwine Vlad the Impaler with sinister ventriloquists' models in one episode, leading to the interchange which neatly encapsulates the episode:
The Middleman: Dubbie, did he just turn into a bat puppet?
Wendy: Man, I don't even have an opinion.
This show, how much it is loved. By me. And, hopefully, after all these carefully-displayed gems, by most of you lot too.
- Currently feeling:
still headachy. Phooey
Good Friday is good because it's Friday, naturally, but actually it's giving me enough pleasant surprises that I feel the need to construct an Anti-Rant List. Pollyanna, that's me.
- My Cherished Institution randomly, and without warning or fanfare, doubled its bandwidth this week. My vague sense of "gosh, things are faster, all the students must be bunking" resolved itself this morning when I found the cheery "oh, by the way, we doubled our bandwidth" email in my inbox. This is unlikely enough that it may actually herald the apocalypse (and I have to say, finally acquiring home ADSL was probably at least the Second Horseman), but fundamentally I don't care.
- Book Club last night was, as usual, pleasantly drunken and magpie-chattery, but my usual complete insecurity about my book choice resolved itself, after a spirited wrangle involving some definitive flag-planting, into a group decision to acquire 8 out of my 9 choices, the 9th being rejected because someone owned it already. I feel validated. Also, totally zombified on too much wine and lack of sleep.
- Also, the book club loves the Hobbit, who was a total affection-slut all evening, and I had to shake everyone down when they left to make sure no-one had stashed him in a book bag. In even better news, neither the SPCA nor Gumtree has any evidence of someone mourning his loss. Maybe I will get to keep him.
- Book club has also left me with the prospect of the new Lee Child, the new Margaret Atwood sf (even if she refuses to call it sf), Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which is apparently the gritty postmodern take on the HP/Narnia utopianness, a frothy Alexander McCall Smith romp about linguistics professors, and Tuesdays with Morrie, which about five separate people have recommended to me as a particularly good exploration of someone suffering from ALS, the disease my dad has. My shelf of unread books is already about two metres long without that lot, but it's all good.
- I discovered this morning, after bumbling out the house in my usual daze without remembering to blow-dry my hair, that in fact this cut looks better if I don't blow-dry it. The cut was one of those annoying miscommunications with the hairdresser, who seems to have broken 5 years of careful training in order to ignore my dictates about non-layering. Mostly, though, this demonstrates that my blow-drying skills go way beyond "incompetent" into "catastrophic fumbling." I'm OK with this. Life's too short to blow-dry your hair.
- I'm not doing anything this evening! Well, taking the lone rejected book back to the bookshop, paying for them, and visiting my dad. But then I get to veg out in front of the Middleman, and go to bed early in preparation for the weekend's mad socialising (Thai food with jo&stv tomorrow, lunch in Stellenbosch on Sunday for Salty Cracker). Life can hold no more.
- Today's XKCD made me snerkle like a loon, particularly the mouse-over text. Yes, "snerkle like a loon" is my new phrase.
- Currently feeling:
Friday! Fridayfridayfriday! - Currently listening to:for some bizarre reason not unconnected to random browsing, Tommy Tutone
I have a dreadfully unscientific method of book-acquisition, frequently entailing a random drift around bookshops until something catches my eye. In this case I thought vaguely, "Ooh, remember someone on Teh Internets somewhere saying something vaguely good about that, and it has a catchy title and is cheap, bonus!" This is how I became the proud possessor of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party. I admit in retrospect that I may also have been seduced by the book itself, which is a beautifully-made hardback with lovely, period-feel fonts and layout, and that wonderful fluffy irregularity to the edge of its pages. I find myself stroking them a lot. The book itself is an appropriately concrete realisation of the story it houses, a tightly-focused exercise in eighteenth-century voice.
Octavian Nothing is absolutely not my kind of book. I bought it because I vaguely associated it with young adult fantasy; it's certainly not a fantasy, and I'd quarrel quite radically with the idea that it's a young adult book. What it is is a stunningly period-voiced disquisition on human brutality, race, misplaced science, slavery and the American War of Independence. I read it in an enormous gulp during one sitting on Tuesday afternoon, when I was reclining on the sofa being Sidded; it was a cruelly mesmerising read, emotionally flaying and horribly inevitable while gripping like a boa constrictor. I hate politics, I know very little about American history, I particularly find slavery and race politics difficult, and I could not put the damned thing down.
The story is quite weird, actually: the titular character is a black boy, son of a slave, raised in truly odd circumstances, in considerable luxury amid a houseful of intellectuals - scientists, philosophers, artists who effectively give him a Classical education. Octavian's own voice is thus unique and compelling in the sections he narrates, and his naive perspective on his surroundings is frequently damning. The book's effect is subtle; the issues and true circumstances emerge gradually, inescapably. You will, I have to say, never look at science in the same way again - the eighteenth-century notion of an acceptable experiment would curl your hair.
Above all, though, this is a superb example of narrative in the Gothic mode, its true focus the monstrous, the abject, the entrapping. I would have been utterly traumatised to read this as a teenager. I'm not sure I wasn't utterly traumatised anyway. On the other hand, you should probably read this book.
Octavian Nothing is absolutely not my kind of book. I bought it because I vaguely associated it with young adult fantasy; it's certainly not a fantasy, and I'd quarrel quite radically with the idea that it's a young adult book. What it is is a stunningly period-voiced disquisition on human brutality, race, misplaced science, slavery and the American War of Independence. I read it in an enormous gulp during one sitting on Tuesday afternoon, when I was reclining on the sofa being Sidded; it was a cruelly mesmerising read, emotionally flaying and horribly inevitable while gripping like a boa constrictor. I hate politics, I know very little about American history, I particularly find slavery and race politics difficult, and I could not put the damned thing down.The story is quite weird, actually: the titular character is a black boy, son of a slave, raised in truly odd circumstances, in considerable luxury amid a houseful of intellectuals - scientists, philosophers, artists who effectively give him a Classical education. Octavian's own voice is thus unique and compelling in the sections he narrates, and his naive perspective on his surroundings is frequently damning. The book's effect is subtle; the issues and true circumstances emerge gradually, inescapably. You will, I have to say, never look at science in the same way again - the eighteenth-century notion of an acceptable experiment would curl your hair.
Above all, though, this is a superb example of narrative in the Gothic mode, its true focus the monstrous, the abject, the entrapping. I would have been utterly traumatised to read this as a teenager. I'm not sure I wasn't utterly traumatised anyway. On the other hand, you should probably read this book.
- Currently feeling: reluctantly impressed
- Currently listening to:compilation of 80s hits
- smoczek makes damned good potjie, even with ostrich necks. Ate too much. Also, drank too much, and played cat-cushion for far too long - leg numb. On the upside, Meep cute.
- Never underestimate the simple, giddy, essentially postmodern glee caused by listening to acoustic David Bowie covers sung in Portuguese. maxbarners bought the Seu Jorge Life Acquatic album, which I have subsequently borrowed as a stop-gap while I acquire my own copy. I loved the music in Life Acquatic, and that was even before my Gigantic Bowie Fangirling Phase, which is still rampant even if slightly tamed. Portuguese is a lovely language to accompany acoustic guitar, it's all soft and flowing, and the acoustic arrangements lay pleasingly bare the melodic and tonal complexities of Bowie's music. Also, Seu Jorge is capable of rewriting "Space Oddity" with a slightly rocking Latin rhythm, and doing full justice to the doomed-loved-ballad of "Lady Stardust". Am hooked.
So, Sheri S. Tepper. Tepper is a thoroughly under-rated writer who to my mind should win far more awards than she does: her narratively-driven science fiction novels weave feminist and ecological themes into striking, sweeping, often quirky and original space opera or post-apocalyptic landscapes. In the category of Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic, though, she has her earlier True Game works, which are technically sf but actually feel like fantasy, not just in their semi-magical component but in the colour, symbol and glitter of a medievaloid world. This is actually nine short books, grouped into three sets of three. The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped is chronologically the first series, although actually written later; its strong-minded heroine offers one of the best explorations of shape-shifting I've come across, as well as some truly magical settings, creatures and people, and a very interesting attack on societies which repress their women. The True Game is the most high-medieval, all ritual and colour, a highly stylised social structure whose essentially fascist and self-destructive elements are mercilessly exposed as the story unfolds. The Jinian trilogy, which concludes the series, gets further into ecological issues, the nature of magic and the exposure of the science-fiction rationale which actually underpins the world. This series is one of my comfort reads, I've lost count of the number of times I've revisited it; it's a madly beguiling mix of whimsy, colour and underlying seriousness, and the world itself (like many of Tepper's an animate entity in its own right) is enormously appealing in sharp contrast to the human stupidity the narrative forces one to condemn.
In a nutshell: shifters, sorcerors, necromancers, wizards, dervishes; heraldry and hierarchical battle, feudalism and fighting. Chasm cities build on giant roots of vines. Endearing beasties that sing, and duets with same. Rolling stars, forest spirits, amorous giant pigs, pastoral unicorn romances. Love, hate, revenge, dreams, knowledge lost and found. Tough women, rather self-absorbed men, journeys through the memories of a world. Gnarlibarrs. Shadows. Mean-spirited academics. Mystical chess sets. Hope. Despair. Loss. The incredible joy of magical powers, and the terrible realisation that we probably don't deserve them. Also, my editions have extremely beautiful stylised covers.
And, see, not so much with the postmodernism, either! I am forced to admire my own self-restraint.
- Currently feeling:tired, full, happy
- Currently listening to:Seu Jorge, the "Life Acquatic" sessions
Monday's dawn saw a sort of sea-foggy thing rolling in, which from my office window exhibited the most amazing giant, soft, billowy wave effect, which I then almost completely failed to actually catch in this photo. On the upside: bonus geese.
.
In other news, while not wibbling financially I am managing to distract myself very nicely, thank you, with a combination of reading and knitting. (Ravenclaw scarf in bamboo. 20 rows in and still haven't screwed up the rib. On the downside, am conscious of mild desire for a wand (willow, unicorn hair) and the relevant incantation to make the knitting do its own automatic thing, at least until I get to the interesting bit with the bronze stripe. One of my colleagues in my Late Lamented Department persists in referring to me as "Hermione", I figure I may as well make it work for me).
On the upside, have discovered Ysabeau S. Wilce, courtesy of (a) a recommendation from, IIRC, sarahtales, and (b) the book title: Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. For YA fantasy this is some high quality worldbuilding, characterised not only by a sharp, vivid, economical writing style but by some truly lovely games with gender identity, family obligation and the nature of "evil" (if you think it's evil you probably haven't heard its side of the story). Her giant, animus-inhabited houses are also pleasingly demented, and she has a nice line in capitalisation. I thoroughly enjoyed this: in intelligence, originality and wit it's a cut above the usual YA fantasy fare. And she's written a sequel! So I'm going to cheat like hell, and assume that that's my Ginormous Fantasy Epic for the day, although strictly it probably isn't. But at least you're spared me wittering on about Sheri S. Tepper1.
In a nutshell: Victorian cultural nods, kick-butt female soldiers, giant shapeshifty houses, stupid dogs. Very cool magic, including Strange Symbols to the power of n. Blue supernatural entities with talons and droopy spaniel ears. Huitzl, humming-bird gods, housework, human sacrifice. Rangers, a new and original formula. Effeminate pirates. Couture. Kilts. Confusion. Roman cultural bits.
.In other news, while not wibbling financially I am managing to distract myself very nicely, thank you, with a combination of reading and knitting. (Ravenclaw scarf in bamboo. 20 rows in and still haven't screwed up the rib. On the downside, am conscious of mild desire for a wand (willow, unicorn hair) and the relevant incantation to make the knitting do its own automatic thing, at least until I get to the interesting bit with the bronze stripe. One of my colleagues in my Late Lamented Department persists in referring to me as "Hermione", I figure I may as well make it work for me).
On the upside, have discovered Ysabeau S. Wilce, courtesy of (a) a recommendation from, IIRC, sarahtales, and (b) the book title: Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. For YA fantasy this is some high quality worldbuilding, characterised not only by a sharp, vivid, economical writing style but by some truly lovely games with gender identity, family obligation and the nature of "evil" (if you think it's evil you probably haven't heard its side of the story). Her giant, animus-inhabited houses are also pleasingly demented, and she has a nice line in capitalisation. I thoroughly enjoyed this: in intelligence, originality and wit it's a cut above the usual YA fantasy fare. And she's written a sequel! So I'm going to cheat like hell, and assume that that's my Ginormous Fantasy Epic for the day, although strictly it probably isn't. But at least you're spared me wittering on about Sheri S. Tepper1.In a nutshell: Victorian cultural nods, kick-butt female soldiers, giant shapeshifty houses, stupid dogs. Very cool magic, including Strange Symbols to the power of n. Blue supernatural entities with talons and droopy spaniel ears. Huitzl, humming-bird gods, housework, human sacrifice. Rangers, a new and original formula. Effeminate pirates. Couture. Kilts. Confusion. Roman cultural bits.
1 I should generally be prevented from wittering on about Sheri S. Tepper. Feminism results. Also, postmodernism. Also, fangirly drool.
- Currently feeling: marginally grumpy
My morning was made by the Cyclone press release, which apparently felt the need to reassure the public that their spanky new Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) was not designed to feed on corpses. Or, presumably, the flesh of the living. I love this because it's such an affirmation of the pervasiveness of science fiction, particularly in that ridiculously cyberpunkian sense in which the future, increasingly, is now. Critics wibble on about how sf is tacky, unintelligent drivel, but in the meantime it has firmly colonised our mental processes and in fact provides a necessary vocabulary for processing our responses to the future. Particularly our fear of the future and its potentially lethal technologies - you present the current human population with a robot designed to scavenge for wood chips, they will immediately imagine it feeding on flesh. (Well, didn't you?). On some subliminal level, it's all Mary Shelley's fault.
Of course, now I have a desire to write a bleak, post-apocalpytic sf story in which EATRs roam the blasted landscape, a glitch in their programming having caused them to shift from vegetable matter to corpses, and then to hunt down the terrified packs of live humans hiding in the rubble. But I don't need to. Someone will. In a thirty-year-old back issue of an sf magazine, someone probably already has.
A bit of a jump from flesh-eating robots to Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic Month, but discipline must be maintained. Today: James Blaylock, whose Balumnia books (The Stone Giant, The Elfin Ship, The Disappearing Dwarf) technically qualify as epic fantasy in the sense that they offer a three-volume series involving Elves, magic, quests and plots by evil dwarves. Within this framework, however, the stories operate as almost a parody of high fantasy's heroic quest and magical realm. I think they owe something of a debt to Tolkien's Hobbit in following the somewhat reluctant adventures of a hapless, domestic hero; they are peopled with wonderful, memorable eccentrics and a rather wayward and wandering plot design. To say that the books are "whimsical" and "charming" is a cop-out - it doesn't really give you a sense of their off-beatness, their apparently inconsequential construction of meaning, the underlying seriousness of their comic moments. A lot of Blaylock's other novels are more magical realism than fantasy, and that fabulous, dreamlike, accepting tone is very much present.
In a nutshell: quests, adventures, cheese-making. Steampunk tech, mad science, strange biology. Offbeat elves in flying ships, eccentrics in submarines. Heroes named Jonathan Bing, Theophilus Escargot and Professor Artemis Wurzle. Poets, pies, dogs, evil dwarves, magical marbles, transdimensional paperweights, goblins with flaming heads. Oddness. In a good way.
Of course, now I have a desire to write a bleak, post-apocalpytic sf story in which EATRs roam the blasted landscape, a glitch in their programming having caused them to shift from vegetable matter to corpses, and then to hunt down the terrified packs of live humans hiding in the rubble. But I don't need to. Someone will. In a thirty-year-old back issue of an sf magazine, someone probably already has.
A bit of a jump from flesh-eating robots to Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic Month, but discipline must be maintained. Today: James Blaylock, whose Balumnia books (The Stone Giant, The Elfin Ship, The Disappearing Dwarf) technically qualify as epic fantasy in the sense that they offer a three-volume series involving Elves, magic, quests and plots by evil dwarves. Within this framework, however, the stories operate as almost a parody of high fantasy's heroic quest and magical realm. I think they owe something of a debt to Tolkien's Hobbit in following the somewhat reluctant adventures of a hapless, domestic hero; they are peopled with wonderful, memorable eccentrics and a rather wayward and wandering plot design. To say that the books are "whimsical" and "charming" is a cop-out - it doesn't really give you a sense of their off-beatness, their apparently inconsequential construction of meaning, the underlying seriousness of their comic moments. A lot of Blaylock's other novels are more magical realism than fantasy, and that fabulous, dreamlike, accepting tone is very much present. In a nutshell: quests, adventures, cheese-making. Steampunk tech, mad science, strange biology. Offbeat elves in flying ships, eccentrics in submarines. Heroes named Jonathan Bing, Theophilus Escargot and Professor Artemis Wurzle. Poets, pies, dogs, evil dwarves, magical marbles, transdimensional paperweights, goblins with flaming heads. Oddness. In a good way.
- Currently feeling: pleasantly Sundayish
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