Mar 21 2018

Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) by Iain M. Banks

My first thought on finishing this book is “That was stupid.” And maybe in the late 1980s when this was written, the concepts invoked might have been considered new and interesting enough to paper over the book’s many other faults. In 2018, however, reading Consider Phlebas was a hard, unrewarding slog.

First and foremost, this book is really badly written. I am aghast that anyone could think otherwise. Iain M Banks loves to describe and describe and describe in mind-numbing detail the least interesting parts of the scenery. He spends pages describing the appearances of the crew of the CAT for no discernible reason other than to say “hey, these aren’t the standard humans you’re familiar with!” Which is also? A wildly unnecessary task. If their non-standard bodily characteristics had had any bearing on the narrative then great, but spoiler: they don’t! And every scene on the trains in the end was incredibly dull by virtue of being hopelessly overwritten. There is suspense and there is sheer tedium, and I was bored as hell by all the myriad descriptions of ruined metal. It was a total trainwreck of over-writing.

There were a lot of interesting set pieces that were just overworked by Mr Banks and then further made irrelevant by not having consequences beyond said set piece (tho I did enjoy the callback to the Damage game at the end.) I think a large part of the problem with Consider Phlebas is that it reads as if Mr Banks was trying to “redeem” the space opera genre. That kind of authorial condescension never bodes well for the reading public. It’s one thing to write for yourself, or for love of a genre (one excellent recent example being S. A. Chakraborty’s City Of Brass, which was originally Islamic history/fantasy fan fiction) but to go into writing, particularly into writing genre fiction, without the primary purpose of entertaining your readers, pretty much dooms your book to being a dull, moralizing exercise devoid of genre’s enlivening spirit.

I also wasn’t the hugest fan of the politics of this book. The Culture is a socialist techno-utopia that starts a war against the religious militants of the Idiran because the latter are a provocation to the former’s way of life? Which somehow justifies the billions of lives lost? The fuckery is this? That reasoning is sheer propaganda, the kind of excuse bandied about by greedy politicians and generals intending to exploit an area’s resources, to their gullible/sheltered constituents back home in order to pacify complaints about cost a/o morality. No one actually goes to war for that reason, it makes zero sense. Even the Christian crusades had the dubious goal of retaking the holy land, not just a “Muslims are a provocation” nonsense. Had the Idirans attacked first, this would have made a ton more sense, but Mr Banks was busily pushing a weird Noble Savage narrative that I found incredibly irritating, especially since they were clearly a stand-in for Islamic civilization. It was like he was trying to invert conventional Western expectations, which I’m all for, but did it in a way that ignored basic concepts of logic and self-preservation inherent to most sentient beings (not that I know any beyond human beings, but is a reasonable extrapolation given that we’re talking about a book written by a human person for a human audience.)

Anyway, this book was dumb, and I’m sorry I suggested it to Ingress book club. Book clubbers, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry. I hope the TV version that started our conversation is way better.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/21/consider-phlebas-culture-1-by-iain-m-banks/

Mar 19 2018

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.” (p. 1)

So much of The Dispossessed is already laid out for readers in the novel’s opening paragraph: things that do not look important but are, the reality of ideas, the rough and improvised nature of a key setting even after seven generations of settlement, the strength of people’s willingness to follow customs. No people appear in the first paragraph, and though people are alluded to in a general way on the book’s second page, no specific characters make an appearance until the third, and no names are mentioned until the seventh.

With this start, Le Guin signals to her readers that The Dispossessed will be a novel of ideas and of types as much as it is of the individual characters who populate the two worlds where the book takes place. I have sometimes seen The Dispossessed with the subtitle “An Ambiguous Utopia,” although the edition I have simply says “A Novel” on the title page. In either case the reality of ideas, the idea of boundary, the notions of utopia, and the seven generations are all important to both setting and story.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/19/the-dispossessed-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Mar 18 2018

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

What a terrific book. What it lacked in pathos for me, it more than made up for in the breadth of its empathy and historical vision.

Structured as eight short stories and an epilogue connected by their cast and timeline, Lovecraft Country plunges an ordinary black family of the 1950s and their friends into the kinds of eldritch terror made famous by that dreadful racist, H. P. Lovecraft. If anything, the main weakness of Matt Ruff’s book is that it doesn’t reach the levels of creeping supernatural horror often achieved by the book’s namesake. However, it more than makes up for it by exposing the all too real horrors of American racism, something far too many Americans want to forget or pretend were never that bad. Mr Ruff does something extraordinary with this book by not only putting this terrible evil front and center but also by making it a worse villain than anything dreamt of in natural philosophy, as the occultists in this book call their branch of study.

My favorite stories were, interestingly enough, the ones with female protagonists. Hippolyta Disturbs The Universe was easily my favorite of the bunch, both in the dream-like quality of the storytelling and for the sheer scariness of it. And the emotions! As a mother and an intellectual, I very much connected with Hippolyta and with Ida. It was also hard not to connect deeply with Ruby’s story in Jekyll In Hyde Park, even after coming to sympathize so well with her brave and clever sister, Letitia, in the first two stories. Which isn’t to say that the male characters aren’t also well drawn and sympathetic, just that Mr Ruff does an exceptional job writing of black women, a demographic which he does not have a natural advantage in, not being a part of either.

Anyway, I’ve already added another book of his to my To-Read pile because this extraordinary book shows off a mind that is at once keenly intelligent and determinedly kind, a combination I particularly love of my authors. Also, Mr Ruff’s writing is funny as hell. Atticus’ deadpan response to Samuel’s big speech in the opening story still makes me laugh just thinking about it. I have a feeling that reading more of Mr Ruff will be both a pleasure and a reminder to be a force for good and the truth. Not many authors can pull off both.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/18/lovecraft-country-by-matt-ruff/

Mar 17 2018

The Girl Who Drank The Moon by Kelly Barnhill

I really wanted to like this more, after the strong recommendation I got for it from Saladin Ahmad, but it was so weirdly annoying! It was very hard for me to believe that a 500 year-old witch who had been instrumental in helping to maintain the health and happiness of a large populace through one-on-one interactions could be so absolutely bone-headed in raising her own child. And I’m not saying that parenting is easy — I have an absolutely lovely 7 year-old and adorable 4 year-old twins who are a trial — and I absolutely 100% believe that discipline is hard but it felt like Xan just didn’t even try to get Luna to focus before locking away all her magic with a half-assed spell. I get it, children are exhausting, especially if you’re no spring chicken, but there was a distinct element of “oh, Luna is too lively for me to contain through actual parenting” that I found exceptionally irritating.

There were some fun twists on the typical fairy tale, and I thought the parable of the Protectorate and its politicians to be quite apt for our present times, but the book felt a little too pleased with its idea of its own cleverness overall. I suppose I might have liked it as a young reader, but as a parent, I thought it was pretty meh, and I’m usually a sucker for the parent-who-will-do-anything-for-their-child storyline, of which this book had not just one but two!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/17/the-girl-who-drank-the-moon-by-kelly-barnhill/

Mar 11 2018

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

The fuck was that?!

And I don’t mean that in a bad way either, it was just weird as hell and kinda gross. Pulling my professional pants on, I’m pretty sure the greatest part of my disorientation is the fact that, while this is billed as an outer space opera, I couldn’t shake the impression that this was all inner space and that these women were really anthropomorphized cell structures within a greater biological organism, of which the world/ships were also a component. I would love to see what an actual biologist would have to say about this (and don’t think I haven’t trawled the Internet looking.)

Anyway, there’s this character, Zan, who wakes up with amnesia after coming back from a failed raid on the world/ship Mokshi. Apparently, she keeps going in and keeps getting shot back out, the sole survivor, to return to her war-like people, the Katazyrna. At least, she thinks they’re her people, as Jayd, the beautiful woman she instinctively knows she loves, keeps telling her when she returns. But there’s something rotten in the state of Katazyrna, and when Jayd leaves Zan to form a political alliance with the world/ship Bhajava, whose warriors are ostensibly the reason Zan keeps failing to complete her raids on the Mokshi, Zan finds herself adrift and unsure who to trust, especially after all hell breaks loose and she finds herself facing a fate worse than death.

So far so space opera, and Kameron Hurley hits all the notes, even the ones that feel perfunctory (see: the climax, of a sort, in the Mokshi control room.) The emotions felt less than inhabited, particularly as the book wore on. Jayd wasn’t a terribly convincing character emotionally and while I enjoyed the idea of the change in her relationship with Zan by the end, I didn’t care about the actuality. Maybe it’s because I didn’t at all feel the impact of her earlier and greatest betrayal, and so I didn’t really understand the need for change viscerally. Like, I get it intellectually but there were also a lot of intellectual reasons for their relationship to continue as it was so idk.

Definitely a wild ride of a book and recommended for anyone wanting something entirely fresh in science fiction. It’s still tough for me to think of this setting as the future of outer space, tho, instead of a clever retelling of biological processes at the cellular level.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/11/the-stars-are-legion-by-kameron-hurley/

Mar 08 2018

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

At different parts in the Discworld books, Terry Pratchett considers what might happen when something like a modern technology appears in the magical, quasi-medieval societies of the Disc. Moving Pictures was the first of these, back at the 10th book in the set, and they become more common later in the run. The Truth introduces newspapers. Going Postal features a revival of Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Mail. The clacks, a semaphore system that has effects a bit like the telegraph and the internet did in our world, was introduced in The Fifth Elephant, though it was not the main topic of the story. Looking at what other people have written, I see that I have a few more ahead of me in the eight books that remain after Going Postal.

I started out skeptical about Going Postal. The setup struck me as a deus ex Vetinari: using the powers and abilities of Ankh-Morpork’s ruling Patrician to set the story in motion, rather than having it emerge more naturally from the setting or from previously established characters. The authorial hand is very visible in the beginning. Pratchett wants a certain kind of character doing a particular thing with the postal service. On the other hand, the kind of character Pratchett wants at the center of this book is interesting: Moist van Lipwig is a con man, a thief, a reprobate. He has been looking out for number one so long that looking for a way to get away with the loot is a reflex.

The clacks have been taken over by a bunch of caricature capitalists, and Vetinari wants some competition in the business of delivering messages, so he puts Lipwig in charge of reviving the ancient postal service that was once the pride of Ankh-Morpork but has since fallen onto hard times. It’s not so much administrative ability that’s necessary to restoring the post but rather the ability to inspire people to believe that it will function. And getting people to believe things is Lipwig’s specialty.

I think that Going Postal, like Monstrous Regiment, would have been better if it had been shorter. In particular, the first third of the novel feels like it is wandering around, with comic bits playing out longer and more slowly than necessary, and with other developments unfolding at a pace that’s more languid than leisurely. It’s Pratchett, so it’s never hard going, but it’s looser than earlier Discworld books, not always to its benefit.

On the other hand, there are funny bits and arch observations throughout, and the action really is headed somewhere interesting. In some ways, Going Postal is an extended meditation on belief — inspiring it, harnessing it, and taking advantage of it.

“You want to deliver this letter to [the god] Offler?” [the priest] said, yawning. An envelope had been placed in his hand.
“It’s addressed to him,” said Moist. “And correctly stamped. A smartly written letter always gets attention. I’ve also brought a pound of sausages, which I believe is customary. Crocodiles [the god’s aspect] love sausages.”
“Strictly speaking, you see, it’s prayers that go up to the gods,” said the priest doubtfully. …
“As I understand it,” said Moist, “the gift of sausages of Offler by being fried, yes? And the spirit of the sausages ascends unto Offler by means of the smell? And then you eat the sausages?”
“Ah, no. Not exactly. Not at all,” said the young priest, who knew this one. “It might look like that to the uninitiated, but, as you say, the true sausagidity goes straight to Offler. He, of course, eats the spirit of the sausages. We eat the mere earthly shell, which believe me turns to dust and ashes in our mouths.”
“That would explain why the smell of sausages is always better than the actual sausage, then?” said Moist. “I’ve often noticed that.”
The priest was impressed. “Are you a theologian, sir?”
“I’m in … a similar line of work,” said Moist (pp. 332-33)

Pratchett had also been listening to the women in his life, and believing them. Moist is in a disreputable bar, meeting up with a woman from the golem trade, Miss Dearheart.

When [Moist] returned, his seat was occupied by a Currently Friendly Drunk. Moist recognized the type, and the operative word was “currently.” Miss Dearheart was leaning back to avoid his attentions and more probably his breath.
Moist heard the familiar cry of the generously sloshed.
“What … right? What I’m saying is, right, what I’m saying, nahrmean, why won’t you, right, gimme a kiss, right? All I’m saying is—” (p. 292)

Miss Dearheart drives a spiky heel into the drunk’s foot, and tells him how hard she can kick with the other spike.

With great care the man stood up, turned and, without a backward glance, lurched unsteadily away.
“Can I bother you?” said Moist. Miss Dearheart nodded, and he sat down, with his legs crossed. “He was only a drunk,” he ventured.
“Yes, men say that sort of thing,” said Miss Dearheart. (p. 393)

Once it gets underway, though, Going Postal is zippy fun with just enough seriousness to keep the deliveries from going astray. Much of that comes from Moist looking at the world with new eyes, as he sees both the perils and the possibilities of having people truly believe in him for ends greater than quick cash.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/08/going-postal-by-terry-pratchett/

Mar 07 2018

The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

I should not have taken as long as I did to get through China Miéville’s novella, The Last Days of New Paris. The main story is less than 180 pages; the afterword tacks on another 15 or so, and I mostly did not read the notes that are appended afterward. That the words “get through” are the first that spring to mind is telling, though I suppose the larger lesson is that Miéville’s work is hit-or-miss for me. I’ve read eight of his 13 published books (tried a ninth, Un Lun Dun, but bounced). Perdido Street Station felt like a revelation when I read it; The City & The City is terrific, an amazing mash-up of Cold War, maybe-magic, and the human tendency not to see what we don’t want to see. I’m not sure that it fulfills all of its promises, but even getting nine-tenths of the way there is an achievement. I’ve been told that Embassytown is as good as these two; it’s on my shelf of books to read, and I’m looking forward to reading it at some point. On the other hand, This Census-Taker didn’t do much for me.

In the world of The Last Days of New Paris, a massive, mystical bomb exploded in the French capital in 1941, releasing strange energies into streets newly occupied by the invading Wehrmacht. Within a certain yet uncertain radius around the point of detonation, the laws of physics have been pushed aside and Surrealist works have manifested themselves into reality. The top half of the Eiffel tower remains suspended in midair though the bottom half has been destroyed. The novella opens with one of these manifestations, which Miéville calls manifs, headed toward a German barricade somewhere in the streets of Paris. The manif is a “torso, jutted from the bicycle itself, its moving prow, a figurehead where handlebars should be. She was extruded from the metal. She pushed her arms backward and they curled at the ends like coral. She stretched her neck and widened her eyes.” (p. 4) Another woman is riding the manif, which is a thing that Miéville’s narrator, Thibaut, says should not be. He is not able to find out much more. The Germans shoot both manif and rider. Thibaut scampers from his hiding place long enough to hear the rider’s dying words and receive a playing card from her.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/07/the-last-days-of-new-paris-by-china-mieville/

Mar 03 2018

Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) by Jeff VanderMeer

The more I think back on it, the lovelier this novel grows in my mind. The atmosphere and tone are unsettling and consistently oppressive: I kept thinking how Lovecraftian it was, and yet so much better for not being rife with horrible stereotypes. Bad shit happens early to our four explorers who’ve been sent into Area X, the mysterious region that many expeditions have tried and failed to examine, and things gets crazy in a way that is both horrifying and disturbingly lyrical, with shades of horror and sci-fi — general, psychological and ecological — washing over everything as relentlessly as the incoming tide.

Above all, however, this is a deeply affecting love story between an introvert and the man she lost and is, perhaps, still looking for. It’s the kind of book that had me running to get the sequel. It’s the kind of book that makes me more interested in watching the movie adaptation than otherwise (especially since, hello, that’s Queen Amidala getting it on with Poe Dameron!) I’ve heard that the movie is quite different from the book but I’m willing to forgive it that because of all the wealth the book has to offer, tho I’ll likely be annoyed more by any changes to The Biologist’s relationship with her husband than to any changes to the constantly mutable Area X and whatever happens there.

Oh, and the only weakness of this book was the exceedingly wooden dialog. Granted, Annihilation takes the form of a journal written by The Biologist, who often seems a little deaf to the nuances of human interactions, so that’s forgivable once you figure that out, tho is quite jarring in the early stages of reading the novel. Regardless, I’m looking forward to experiencing more of the series, books, movie and all.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/03/annihilation-southern-reach-1-by-jeff-vandermeer/

Feb 26 2018

The Naive and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

If I had read The Naive and Sentimental Novelist before reading Orhan Pamuk’s novels, I probably would not have bothered with them. That would have been a pity because most of them are very good, and one, Snow, is among the best I have ever read. So there’s a considerable gap between this collection of six essays — delivered in 2009 as the Norton Lectures at Harvard University — that describe how he thinks about novel writing and the actual results. Pamuk certainly isn’t the first to be better at doing what he does than he is at explaining it.

I think there are several reasons the essays annoyed me so much, some of them relating to personal tics, at least one related to the process of making this book, and others relating to what Pamuk actually has to say. To take the middle first, Turkish has just one pronoun, “o,” for the third person singular. A person writing in Turkish, as Pamuk does, will not necessarily have to consider whether “he” or “she” is appropriate, whether a more clearly inclusive construction such as “he or she” is necessary, or whether to draw on the venerable but lately deprecated tradition of the singular “they.” Nor will such a writer consider taking the time to recast the sentence to avoid pronouns completely. Pamuk can use “o” any time he writes about a generic individual. His translator, however, has to figure out a way to address the issue in English. In this case, Pamuk’s translator has opted for the generic “he” throughout. I stumbled over that quite a bit, and if there’s one thing I feel strongly about in translation, it’s that you don’t want your readers stumbling over your part of the work. Authors can make silly arguments, sure (some of mine have), but you should not be adding barriers between your readers and the work.

Another problem I had with this work is also related to pronouns. It’s a bit of a personal tic, but it has grown to become one because I think it speaks to a deeper issue in essay writing. Pamuk, like many people writing about literature, uses “we” and “us” quite a bit. The authors show us this; we see that; we read; we feel; writers tell us the other. I doubt that there is a two-page spread in all of The Naive and Sentimental Novelist without at least one “we” or “us.” But in Tonto’s immortal words, “What ‘we’, white man?” Or less flippantly, who does Pamuk mean by “we” and “us”? Assumptions lurk in pronouns, and I do not think that Pamuk has examined his much in this regard. Who is he talking about? Who is he talking to? Greater care figuring this out and answering this question would have produced better essays.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/26/the-naive-and-sentimental-novelist-by-orhan-pamuk/

Feb 25 2018

Delivering the Truth (A Quaker Midwife Mystery #1) by Edith Maxwell

Wonderful heroine, great setting, intriguing (but not super clever) mystery. I loved all the attention to period detail (even if my copy had some really weird lapses between the use of “thee” and “you”) and especially enjoyed the blunt way in which pregnancy and delivery are treated. As this book is set in 1800s Massachusetts with a busy midwife heroine, you can expect a bunch of dead babies due to the high mortality rate of the times, so if that puts you off, read elsewhere. Edith Maxwell does not shy away from the horrors of childbirth and pregnancy, and as a mom of three who really, really hates when people act as if pregnancy and childbirth are all magical sunshine and rainbows, I was very much a fan of her pragmatic approach to the subject.

I was less a fan of her treatment of the mentally ill and drug addiction, however. I’ve gone into detail about authorial voice vs character perspective elsewhere, so even giving Ms Maxwell the benefit of the doubt, it’s hard not to conclude that she’s more dismissive of the two issues than warranted (which is also weird because she’s clearly sympathetic to the manic depressive as well as to those suffering from postpartum depression.) There’s entirely too much unnuanced “crazy is crazy” and “drug addicts are terrible people” in a book that is otherwise very careful to love all as equals, in the way of the Society of Friends to which our heroine and the author belong. I’m hoping this is a thing Ms Maxwell grows more empathetic to and clear in writing as the series continues (as I have to read the next one for work,) but I do hope Rose Carroll keeps her warmth and wit, as she is truly a standout creation in a field littered with amateur detectives.

(Also, is there something about old-timey safety bicycles that makes them harder on the knees than modern bikes? As someone who keeps putting off knee surgery, I know it hurts less to ride than to walk, so there were bits about bicycling that left me going, “wait, what?”)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/25/delivering-the-truth-a-quaker-midwife-mystery-1-by-edith-maxwell/