Guess what I’ve been up to? Yes! It’s a novella! It’s the story of an ex-harpy, her harpy ex-girlfriend, and some extremely opinionated weaponry. Pastries! Operettas! Complicated friendships! All in one conveniently sized volume (or file)!
According to United Airlines and FlightTracker, Lisa and travelswithkuma are (as I write this) just heading out over the North Atlantic with a projected route passing over Iceland, Greenland, and Canada on their way to SFO, where they will have four hours to clear Immigration and Customs, re-clear Terrorization, and then board the short flight to Reno. They should arrive around 7:45 PM tonight, and I'll be there to collect them, take them home, help them get their stuff into their cave, and leave them to hibernate for as long as possible.
Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo. Babine's take on both camping and more generally living as a single woman is particularly interesting because she is very much not solo most of the time in this book--this is a book that is grappling with her roots, her family, and engaging with her current family. It paints a picture of a life that can be satisfying without fitting prior molds--and our demographics are such that there are a lot of tiny details that really resonated with me.
Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind. This is the third YA thriller about Native issues in the US, centering around the same families and clusters of characters. Boulley is writing them to try to be stand-alone but interwoven, and I'd like to see how someone who hadn't read the earlier volumes felt about how well this succeeded. I did read the earlier volumes, and I felt like there was quite a lot of "here's an update on someone you already know" going on here, and like the balance of that with the narrative at hand was a bit off. I also think she's set herself a very hard task, because when the real life issues you're writing about genuinely produce people who behave like cartoon villains, you don't want to sanitize them into something more understandable, and yet then you're stuck with the people who behave like cartoon villains. It's a tough problem. So I still found this worth reading, but I felt like the earlier volumes were stronger in some ways.
A'Lelia Bundles, Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. I picked this up from the "new books" shelf in the library, and I fear it's one of those books where the author had a reasonably good bio of a famous ancestor in her, and she wrote that already (a bio of Madam C.J. Walker) and has gone on to what is clearly a labor of love writing about her famous ancestors but doesn't rise to be nearly as interesting to me as the events and subjects on the periphery of the book. Probably mostly recommended for people with a special interest in this era/location.
Martin Cahill, Audition for the Fox. My copy of this arrived early, but it's out now, I think? Interesting take on gods and their relationship with humanity, a fun fantasy novella.
Emilie A. Caspar, Just Following Orders: Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience. This is a fascinating book by a neuropsychologist who has not only done the more standard kind of campus studies into obedience and the variables that affect (or, apparently, in many cases do not affect) it but has also done a lot of interviews and various kinds of brain imaging (fMRI and EEG primarily) on groups of people who could reasonably be described as the foot soldiers of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Caspar's willingness to admit which things she does not know is only one of the things I find refreshing about her work. She's also willing and able to engage with these interviewees on the subject of stopping either themselves or others from committing similar acts, what factors might be important there. This is not a book with all the answers but I'm really glad she's out there asking the questions.
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Reread. The curious thing about this reread is that it's so smoothly written, it's such a pleasant and easy read, that it was startling to notice how little momentum this book has. Each chapter is a lovely reading experience if you like that sort of thing! (You've seen the number of 19th century novels I read. Of course I like that sort of thing.) But also each chapter is a conscious decision to have more of it, because there's very little of either plot or character pushing forward in any way.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy Is My Middle Name. Only a handful of these poems really resonated with me, but the ones that did really resonated with me, which is an interesting experience to have of a poetry collection.
Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages: 987-1460. This is largely about the evolutions of the concepts and theoretical bases of power in French society in this era, and was really interesting for the things it bothered to examine in that way--where and when and how the Roman Catholic church got involved in various life milestones, for example, generally later than one might think while living in a world so shaped by those processes that they may seem obvious. Worth having. Did not hate Philip Augustus enough but is that even possible.
Xochitl Gonzalez, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. I found this harrowing in places, because I am auntie age, so the story of young women making themselves smaller and less interesting for men has my auntie heart wailing "OH BABY NO DON'T DO IT" without, of course, being able to do one darn thing about it. Do they come through the other side from that behavior: well, what is the title, really, it's not a spoiler to say yes. More concretely: this is about a murdered (fictional) Latina artist in the 1980s and an art history student in the late 1990s putting the pieces together. Most of it is not about the putting the pieces together in any kind of thriller/mystery sense. If you're used to that pacing, this pacing will strike you as very weird. Mostly it's about the shapes of their lives. I liked it even when I was reading it between the cracks between my fingers.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Written on the Dark. I feel like the smaller scale of this bit of fantasized history doesn't serve his type of writing well--there's not the grand sweep, and he's not going to turn into a painter of miniatures at this stage of his career. I also--look, I know he's writing these things as fantasy, so he's allowed to change stuff, I just feel like if a character is still obviously Joan of Arc I'm allowed to disagree with his take on Joan of Arc, which I do, on basically every level. Ah well. If you like Kay books, this sure is one all the same.
T. Kingfisher, Hemlock and Silver. I was mildly disappointed in this one. The mirror magic was creepy, but the romance plot felt pro forma to me, some of the plot beats more obvious than a reinterpreted fairy tale novel would strictly require. Of course she can still write sentences, and this was still an incredibly quick read, it just won't make my Favorite T. Kingfisher Books Top Three.
Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners. Reread. This title could also have matched up with The Book of Love but definitely not, not, not vice versa. This is not a book of love. It's a book of disorientation and weirdness. Which I knew going in, but having been here before doesn't make it less like that.
Alec Nevala-Lee, Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs. Look, I can't explain to you why Alec, who seems like a nice guy, has chosen a career path that could be described as "writing biographies of nerds Marissa would not want to have lunch with." But he does a good job of it, they're interesting books and manage to learn a lot about--even understand--their subjects without falling the least bit in love with their subjects. This one is Luis Alvarez. Did a lot of interesting things! Also I went into this book with the feeling that even an hour in his company would be more than I really wanted, and I did not come out of it with any particle of that opinion altered.
Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War. An account of a really interesting time, illuminating of things that came after, somewhat repetitive.
Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Reread. Yes, the stories here were also satisfyingly where I left them, science fictiony and vivid.
Travis Tomchuk, Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the US, 1915-1940. This is actually a book about Italian anarchists in Canada that recognizes that there was a lot of cross-border traffic, so it also looked at those parts of the US that directly affect Canada--Detroit-Windsor, for example. Lots of analysis on Italian immigrants' immigration experiences either as caused by or as causing their radicalism. Interesting stuff but probably not a good choice My First History of Early Twentieth Century Radicalism.
Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold. It is not Wee's fault that I wanted more beasts. Poets are allowed to be metaphorical like that. I did want more beasts, but what is here instead is good being itself anyway.
Fran Wilde, A Catalog of Storms. This was my first reading of this collection but not my first reading of the vast majority of stories within it. This is the relief of a collection by someone whose work I enjoy, knowing that each of the stories will be reliably good and now I have them in one spot, hurrah, glad this is here.
Here's a video of me reading my own poetry for the first time, with SFWA's Speculative Poetry Open Mic. I have not listened to it because I cannot bear listening to myself, but I have hopes that other people feel differently about it....
2014: Creationism is banned in British schools, the first same sex marriages in the UK are conducted, and Canadian Mark Carney helps the UK navigate challenging times. What ever happened to Carney, anyway?
The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann 1 (1.4%)
The Machine by James Smythe 3 (4.3%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2014 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read? Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie God's War by Kameron Hurley Nexus by Ramez Naam The Adjacent by Christopher Priest The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann The Machine by James Smythe
So, yesterday, the wheelchair ramp on the Rt 8 bus I was on developed a bug. Or the system that detects if it is deployed did. The ramp retracted correctly but the bus thought it had not, and would not move.
Ha ha! I pick my routes to maximize alternatives in case of break-downs. I just disembarked and talked over to the LRT. Which, I discovered, was having a minor service delay.
My contingency plans can handle two delays, but not three. Good for me there were just the two. It did mean I was only a little early for work.
On the way home, just after I disembarked from the LRT, an SUV cut the LRT off so the SUV could reach the parking lot ten seconds earlier. If the train had not stopped, I'd have had to stick around, both as a witness and because the accident would blocked the sidewalk between me and the stop I needed to get to.
Less than five minutes after the LRT near-miss, three SUVs tried to turn into the same lane at the same time. I don't think they hit each other but there was a short discussion between the drivers before they all left. I'd have had to stick around for that as well, because it would have blocked the route my bus uses.
Bureau of Sabotage agent Jorj X. McKie is assigned a legal and ethical trap: a planet of victims, who, whether rescued or left to their impending doom, present a danger to the ConSentiency.
Six works new to me: two fantasy (one a roleplaying game), four science fiction. The roleplaying game is part of a series but otherwise, they all seem to be stand-alone.
I'd been posting reviews to LiveJournal since April of 2014 but on September 12, 2014, James Nicoll Reviews went live, with a review of Robert A. Heinlein's Between Planets.
A woodcarver's foster daughter sets out to free a maiden from a magical tower prison, just the sort of thing that always works out exactly according to plan, without unforeseen geopolitical complications.
As I mentioned in my prior post, this event and discussion gave me a bit of an epiphany. It's probably NOT an original one -- I'm sure other people have discussed this point -- but I personally haven't seen it discussed, so I'm going to do so here.
The perennial argument following any public shooting here (slightly less for individually targeted people like Mr. Kirk, but still present) almost always boils down to staunch defenders of the Second Amendment versus people who just want to NOT see random children or adults shot down on a daily basis. And one of the most common soundbite/talking points will be things like "Nothing could be done to stop it, says only country where this happens".
The Second Amendment defenders will trot out their own points, including "kids carried guns to school regularly back in the day and you didn't have lots of school shootings" and "guns don't shoot people, people do" and so on.
A lot of this ends up raising the question: WHY does this happen here in the USA so often, and so rarely elsewhere -- even in places where there are a lot of guns? What's so different about the USA compared to all these other countries?
Well, you know, there are actually a LOT of differences between the USA and most other countries; perhaps the most obvious is that we're a short-term (in the historic sense) patchwork of a lot of different subcultures, divided by states (which function as semi-independent countries INSIDE the country) as well as by background, with populations ranging from surviving Native American populations who are STILL at or near the bottom of the pecking order despite being the ones who were living here when Europeans first arrived, to the descendants of those Europeans, descendants of entire *cities* worth of slaves, descendants of slave owners, refugees, and more.
But in this case, I think the difference that drives the increase in public shootings is something that's so very American that we don't even think about it as a problem -- because it's just the way things have been going here.
Most other civilized countries have safety nets for people. The most obvious is healthcare. Here, heathcare is gated -- and often destructively so. Most other countries have universal healthcare in one form or another.
Most countries also have some other forms of social support -- things that generally reduce, if not eliminate, the number of people for whom the loss of a job equates to instant poverty and living on the street.
Most countries have wide-based educational support so that people who want to learn don't have to go into a hundred thousand dollars of debt just to finish college.
We -- primarily driven, it's now obvious, by the Heritage Foundation and their associates since the 1980s, though starting with RMN in the late 60s - early 70s -- have been steadily eroding the social safety net.
"What's that got to do with shootings?"
Well, more and more people are feeling more and more pressure. If you have a FEW people in desperate circumstances, this usually is a self-limiting problem -- there's many people around who can spare a bit of money, time, or resources, and most of them aren't under desperate strain.
But if more, and more, and more people are under mounting pressure -- "how can I afford the operation?" "I have to keep this job or my whole family loses insurance!" "I have to put up with everything at work because if I miss one payment on my rent I'm out", then there's less "give" in the system. There's more of a feeling of danger, of fear, of potential loss around every corner.
And that means the fragile ones and the angry angry ones will ALSO have less support to get past their own crises. Mom and Dad don't have the energy to really listen to and understand little Jack because they're both working in grinding jobs that force them to act as though the pressure is perfectly normal -- and they're having their own personal problems, that weaken both of them just when their kids need their strength. Or maybe there's JUST Mom or JUST Dad, which makes it harder.
In short, what we're seeing is the increasing sounds of strain on the very fabric of society, as we disassemble the supports that used to keep the strain from becoming unsupportable. THAT is why an increasing number of isolated, angry, terrified people are breaking in such a violent way. No one hears them until they shoot, and even if someone did hear them, no one had anything left to give them as support and relief.
When you create a pressure cooker and keep stoking the fires, the relief valve starts to scream.
I've been notified by three people (so far) that I'm now _persona non grata_ because of a post I made regarding the killing of Mr. Charlie Kirk yesterday.
Two of them made statements that clearly imputed to me statements that I hadn't made, but that they had apparently inferred from what I HAD said.
This is unfortunate, and I don't expect to change their minds (or, in general, anyone's mind, online) about such things. They've made their judgment, they now have that perception of me, and arguing about how someone perceives you is usually a lost cause from the start.
But for the record, I try to write *exactly* what I mean. If I mean to say "Ho, he deserved to die, good job!", I'd quite literally post exactly that.
What I posted said that I don't approve of killing people as a solution to the problem and I'd like to live in a world where that's not viewed as an appropriate solution.
I did then note the irony of the fact that he had explicitly said (very shortly after a school shooting) that some gun deaths were a necessary price for maintaining the Second Amendment's protections.
I also noted that I wouldn't waste prayers, if I prayed, on him, given what he promoted in life.
NONE of that says "I approve of killing people who disagree with me politically". If I want to say that, I don't need to type that long (especially on FB from a phone, which is a big PITA). I can say "Shooting people like Charlie Kirk is a public service and we need more public servants".
I don't try to hide my beliefs in my fiction OR my nonfiction. The closest I get to "subtle" (aside from hiding little Easter Eggs in the Arenaverse) is when I had Jason Wood make an anti-Patriot Act speech thinly disguised as a protest against werewolf-triggered paranoia (since the Morgantown Event is basically his world's 9/11).
If I want to say something, I say it. And I say it very carefully.
If I DON'T say a particular thing, odds are excessively strong that I don't, in fact, mean that thing.
Again for the record, no, I don't approve of people shooting people under any circumstances aside from actual self-defense (he's coming at me with intent to injure or kill). I don't even approve of it in wartime, though by the nature of the beast it does and will happen and I'm generally not going to judge the soldiers for it.
I think Charlie Kirk was doing the world a lot of disservice, and I wish he hadn't done some of the things he was doing, but that didn't earn him a bullet nor do his family and friends deserve the shock.
At the same time, he as an individual leaves me with no particular fond feelings and I feel no obligation to pretend about it.
And I find it grimly, ironically amusing that he publicly espoused the "necessity" of some number of gun deaths to protect the Second Amendment.
This is not, in any way, an approval of the killer or of assassination in general.
I am UNSURPRISED that such things are happening -- to people on both sides of the aisle.
This event and some discussion after it, though, did give me a different epiphany, which I'll write about separately.
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