In The Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne Valente

The stories continue in this second volume of The Orphan's Tales, and I am so ambivalent about what I'm about to say. I love Catherynne Valente as a writer, I do so very much, and yet. There is beautiful prose in this book, intoxicating stories, brilliant twists, interesting characters. And yet. The stories flow and interweave, and usually I love this kind of meandering and intertwining. And yet.

And yet. And yet. And yet.

It's not that they're not lovely. It's just that, plain and simple, there are too many. I can't keep them all in my head, I keep losing track where I am, and when references to earlier stories come up, I remember enough to go "I bet that's a reference to an earlier story!" but not enough to actually remember who those people are and why they were important.

As an experience, it's lovely and yet frustrating, because my memory (and I'd like to think I have a good memory) wasn't up to to the task. For a while, I thought that was the point, that the stories were about how everyone, everyone everywhere, has a story, and you drift by them without even realizing it. I would, I think, have been happier with that, because it's somehow okay to both recognize that everyone has a story, yet also not take upon yourself all the details of remembering every single one.

Then, at the end, it becomes clear that these two books of stories, most lasting no longer than 10-20 pages broken up into two or three chunks, are all circling around one overall story, and when I realized that, I self-flagellated even more, because by now I couldn't remember the stories from the book, and why they were important to the overarching story, let alone the stories from the first book!

The net result was, rather than letting her beautiful prose sweep me away, and relaxing into the stories, I was anxious most of the time, trying to stay on top of a tidal wave that kept dragging me under. It was a stressful experience instead of an overall pleasant one.

However. Inside that, there are stories that are delightful, ideas that made me laugh out loud with delight. The idea of maidens as the larval stage of dragons, for instance, and all those stories of maidens being stolen away by dragons simply tales of misguided adoption.

Or the man made of mice, who were truly terrifying. I don't think I've ever found mice more terrifying.

If I didn't feel the obligation to keep track of the stories and realize how they wove together, I probably would have enjoyed this more. The writing is beautiful, as always. Valente knows how to weave fairy tales that are fresh and yet archetypal. But I couldn't keep the thread.

Turing and Burroughs by Rudy Rucker

*Some Spoilers Below*

I was not a fan of this one. It's an interesting experiment, sure, but it didn't add up to a whole hell of a lot. (On the other hand, I've never read any Burroughs, so I don't know how well the sections that were supposed to be written by him stacked up to what he actually wrote, but they felt strained, like someone trying too hard to be hip.)

In this one, Alan Turing never committed suicide - instead he was the recipient of an assassination attempt, which killed his lover. He then used the theories of biocomputation he was working on (I did look it up, and yes, okay, fine), to make himself a replica of his lover's face, and a replica of his face to paste onto his dead lover, and headed for Tangiers.

While there, the replica of his lover's face starts to rot, and to make a backup, Turing accidentally creates a parasitical intelligence that he calls "skugs" - something slugs, and it may tell you something that I can't remember where the k comes from. He has a skug, he infests Burroughs with a skug, the skugs start to take over Tangiers, it moves to the States, and a secret army facility where they're trying to make an anti-skug bomb, and this is all very strange.

But I like strange. Where this falls down is that it just skirts the edge of strange. And worse, gives us such inconsistent characters. I have absolutely no trouble buying William S. Burroughs as an erratic character. I do have problems when everyone else in the book is just as erratic as Burroughs is. And I mean everyone. People change personalities between paragraphs, contradicting things they've just said, claiming things that are demonstrably untrue. Turing veers wildly between encouraging everyone to have all the sex, gay or otherwise, to being insanely jealous when someone looks at someone else sideways.

It's not that you can't have complexity, but this is not complexity. It feels like the author forgot who each character was between each page. You would need to explore it for it to be complexity. As it is, it's just characters shrieking wildly divergent viewpoints and it's not interesting.

More than that, it squanders an excellent SF question - what if there were a parasitical intelligence? Should we embrace it? Should we try to exterminate it?  How would you try to come to terms with the thing living in your body?

This doesn't happen. Instead, we get characters who one paragraph love their skugs, and the next paragraph hate their skugs, and there's no deeper examination of the issues raised.

Also, I have a huge nitpick with the skug vaccine. Somehow, 48 hours after the skugs arrive in America, the U.S. government has a vaccine. How, exactly? I mean, honestly, how? What is it? How does it work? This is never said. The very idea that you could take a new lifeform, which is not a bacteria and come up with a workable "vaccine" with no side effects in 48 hours beggars belief. It would beggar belief today. It particularly beggars belief in the 1950s. But this is just thrown off as something that happened, not explained.

And that's the problem with much of the book. It dances with interesting ideas, but doesn't engage with them. The characters are all so erratic that William S. Burroughs looks entirely rational. It takes less time to build a "V Bomb" (anti-skug) than it did the A-Bomb. Less than two weeks, I think. It would take two weeks just to get a base together to start studying the project.

It's too bad. I like experiments. I just don't think this one works.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

Melissa has gotten the hang of getting me to read books she wants me to read - putting the first book in the series right into my hands, followed shortly by the second book. This is the way to do it. Otherwise, it goes on a list and languishes there for a long while. Not that I won't get to it eventually, but I have so many lists. (More than fifteen at last count.)

So I get further into this series painlessly, and I'm still very much enjoying it. That being said, it took me longer to really get into this book. With the first one, I hooked into what Grossman was trying to say from nearly the first page, and the whole book built on that with what seemed like effortless grace, but probably came from a whole lot of damned hard work.

This time, I read it, but I wasn't really grabbed until we were halfway through. I think Quentin's ennui for the first half of the book infected me, and while he was halfheartedly looking for a quest and a purpose, the book meandered. I don't know if it's just that, though - it's not like the first book didn't meander too. I just wasn't as into it, although I still enjoyed it.

But then the midpoint comes, and Quentin and Julia are somewhere they don't want to be and trying desperately to return to their thrones. Half the chapters are short looks at Julia's journey, and it took me a while to figure out what I thought about those. I ended up liking them a lot - it was a slow burn towards a heartbreaking payoff. We know something has gone terribly wrong, but not what. At one point, everything started to seem to go well for her, and that just raised the tension - what could have wrecked the new family she'd found?

That, and the tension being turned up on the main characters, drew me in again after the half-way point, and started to be accompanied more with the ideas about growing up and what it means, the world and purpose and how to find one.

When we find out what happened to Julia, it's upsetting, but not gratuitous. It made me uncomfortable, made me wonder if it was a good move, but the more I thought, the more I ended up appreciating it. We see the aftermath for so long, without seeing what it's the aftermath from, which allows us to see her without the lens that knowing would have brought. But knowing brings it into perspective, the way she's stuck between who she was and who she will be, not knowing how to get to either.

Interesting. I am rarely struck by quotes, but it does happen. There was one in this book, but when I go looking on Goodreads, it's not one that was pulled out by anyone else as notable. Well, luckily I haven't given the book back yet....

It's from near the end, when the Lady appears, and it is:

"Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn."

That's what I needed to hear, right now, right when even my family motto of "Things Will Work Out" seemed to not quite offer the comfort it has in the past. I needed that addition, the recognition that sometimes, things won't be all right. But even then, there is mourning, there is letting go, there is something after.

The ending is so strong, about being a hero. Howe being a hero often means, not getting the glory, but getting shafted. And doing it anyway. I may not have been grabbed by the beginning, but man, does this end strong.

"Doctor Diablo Goes Through The Motions" by Saladin Ahmed

I'm breaking from my Thursday posts reviewing science fiction I found on Project Gutenberg, mostly short stories. I'll get back to it next week. But in the meantime, I read a science fiction short story this week that is only a few years old, but I liked it a lot.

I feel bad that I haven't read any Saladin Ahmed yet. Or hadn't, until this story crossed my plate. I follow him on twitter, I've heard good things about his book. The problem is, if you took the list of "things I would like to read," it would easily stretch for several blocks, and so, saying I'd like to read a book is about as useful as saying I'd like to go to the Moon. I would, but it's not going to happen any time soon.

(If you add in books and other media other people think I should read and continually bother me about whether or not I've gotten to them yet, the list gets even longer. That's why I created the recommended by friends list, so people who want me to read something can both know that I will eventually, and that it might take a while.)

I knew his novel would come up on my read of the Hugo nominees, eventually, and didn't do much more about it. But while I was continuing my tour of a friend's Kindle this week, I came across this short story packaged in a Hugo bundle from 2010. (Looks like that's one of the years Ahmed was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award.)

It's very short, and I enjoyed it a whole ton. It feels like there have been a lot of "life from the viewpoint of the supervillains" recently, or seriously, maybe that's just my life. There's Doctor Horrible, of course. On a more personal note, though, there's the long-running PrimeTime Adventures my friend Rob ran for us a few years ago, in which we were not very villainous supervillains, fighting the superhero pawns of a big evil corporation. Then there's the short teaser script my husband wrote for fun, with a Goodfellas take on the supervillain blue collar neighbourhood.

What I'm saying is, the idea about supervillains who are more regular joes than you might think has been rattling around in my brain for a while, and so that made this even more fun to read. It's well written, it's entertaining, but it's also razor sharp when it comes to race and gender and crime, and how the actions of real-life superheroes might do more to feed the prison-industrial complex than anything else.

We have the roles, and we play the parts, but Doctor Diablo sees a glimpse of making a real difference, in ways that are big and flashy and fighting. Except that the big flash fight scene always steals the day.

This one's online at Strange Horizons. Check it out. 

That Night by Alice McDermott

I think this is now the fourth Alice McDermott book I've read. I question why, since they aren't ones I have loved. Then again, it may be because I first read some of her more recent works, that I quite enjoyed, while what's crossed my reading list lately are her first two books, and I definitely don't like them as much. This is an author that's gotten better as she's matured, particularly once she started to focus on telling less universal stories that come across as detailless. Her later books seem to be about Irish-American families, and they sparkle in ways that her earlier books do not. I was not a fan of The Bigamist's Daughter. As for That Night, it's okay, but not great.

In it, she tries to capture late 1950s suburbia, and it's okay, just a little lifeless. There are misunderstood greaser boys. There are girls who tease their hair and court badness. There are wives who are getting more than a little bored. There are men who don't really feel like the suburbs are their homes, just places they visit on the weekends and sleep overnight. No one's happy. Everyone's waiting.

And then one girl gets pregnant, and her mother makes her leave town, and cuts off contact with her boyfriend, and he doesn't know this, and shows up at her place with other greasers in tow, and a fight ensues between the teenagers and all the men of the neighbourhood. That's the That Night of the title.

My main problem, though, the one thing that kept niggling at me, was the inconsistency of the narrator. We're supposed to have a consistent narrator, the 12-year-old neighbour of the knocked-up girl. We're supposed to see this through her eyes. But then, without rhyme or reason, the story spins out to know far more about the home life of the young Romeo, or the internal monologue of his Juliet when she's several states away, and there is no way, absolutely no way, for the narrator to know any of this. And there's no explanation! Just a reminder every once in a while that we have a young girl as narrator.

It drove me crazy. I kept staring at the page, trying to figure out how, given how it's set up, she could possibly know any of this. There's no sign she tracked down everyone in the story in later life, let alone anything to explain all she seems to know about the futures of all the bored housewives around her neighbourhood. It could work as an omniscient narrator. Or it could work as how someone too young to really get it understood what was going on. You just kind of can't have both, while pretending you only have one. It's sloppy, and it kept bringing me out of the story.

Beyond that, it's not as deep as it seems to think it is, and all the details of suburbia are of a universal suburbia, not a specific one with specific people. It's all vague archetypes, and that's a weakness, not selling point. I know McDermott gets better than this. Thankfully.

That said, it's not terrible. It's not kind of...not that much.

A Week in Stories - March 3

TV

 Agent Carter - "Valediction"

I am very much hoping for a second season of Agent Carter, but if this is all we ever get, I will also be satisfied. They didn't leave anything hanging, wrapping things up in satisfactory, if not mind-blowing fashion. It's interesting. The big fight at the end was between two women, which is often a way of shoving a female character to the side. In this case, however, these were two women who we repeatedly saw, not only beat, but destroy every man they fought during the entire series, and so, instead of a sideshow, this was a well-deserved clash of the titans.  It's a nice twist on an oh-so-tired trope.

I read one review that wished the fight had been longer. I was satisfied with how long it was. They had more important things to pack into that hour! Like Sousa's plan in the warehouse. I was so pleased with that. And that he asked Peggy out at the end. I might have a slight crush on Enver Gjokaj, so you can all be quiet out there in the peanut gallery.

And, of course, it's no mistake that the end mirrored very nicely the ending of the first Captain America movie, but with a different outcome. Good job.

Arrow - "Nanda Parbat"

Well, I did not see that coming. And I have no idea what it will mean from now on. This season seems to be about Oliver and his crew growing apart, with them assuming their own roles, and more specifically, some concerns about the choices he's been making. Justifiable concerns, most of the time. This was a big, bold move, and if you haven't seen this episode, I am not going to tell you. I will be very, very interested to see.

Also, Felicity and the Atom, huh? I doubt it will last, but still, it was fun.

Roleplaying Games

Shakespeare, VA

I ran the second session of "Shakespeare, VA," and for the most part, that went very well. The supernatural creepy stuff I'm planting through with a light hand seems to be grabbing people, and I'm enjoying the hell out of the theatre stuff.

One of my players is worried, though, about not being able to keep up with the theatre references, so I'm trying to figure out how to help him find entry into that world without throwing that stuff out the window. Any ideas?

I can't talk about it very much quite yet, but I managed to make an NPC one character thought she would hate decidedly likeable, which was my master plan. Her spotlight episode is coming up in only two more sessions, so then it will be time to test that.

Also, my husband is really awesome at reading Shakespeare and I find that very sexy.  Good acting, whew!

Paper Dolls

We didn't officially play this week, and yet, we really have. It was an off week for this weird three-characters-each, three-alternate-worlds game, and yet, we've been filling in some gaps by writing scenes by email. One of my characters, Bee, whom I'm feeling very protective of these days - she's so broken - has really screwed up her relationship with her husband, Kyle. But we've never seen what that relationship was like when it was good. 

So, the player who has been playing Kyle for me (and he's barely an NPC anymore, he's a fully-realized character) and I wrote three scenes covering their first meeting, first date, and when they found out she was pregnant, only three months into the relationship. They aren't full of drama, but they're so incredibly sweet. It's given me a much clearer idea of what their relationship was like before her anxiety and post-partum issues made her freak out and run for the hills. And also a stronger reason to try to fight to save it.

Then that player also wrote a scene between Kyle and one of her own characters, as we'd never be able to do that at the table unless someone took on a character that is very much hers. That was pretty devastating.

And I'd decided that Bee, while she was separated from her 4-month-old daughter and being held captive, was going to have a mystical experience. That may sound weird, but it makes total sense in context to me - particularly since she's always had trouble with religion, and her husband is a priest, so it's been something that they've never shared. Initially, I thought I was going to play it out during out next session, but then I realized that a) the utter despair that precedes it I couldn't play without alarming Melissa's neighbours, and b) the mystical experience itself would be so internal that there's no way I get it across effectively to the other players.

So I wrote three pages yesterday about how that happened for the other two players to read, and I'm very happy with them.

These two other people and I have been playing a roleplaying game through prose for the better part of a year, and it is far over 300 pages long at this point. So we've taken what we learned there, and are using it to supplement a game that mostly, we play in person, in a living room, acting out the scenes. The supplementary material, though, has been there to support the main action, and has really enriched it. I can't wait for next Monday when we can see what happens from here.

Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre

*Some Major Spoilers Below*

This was a hard book to track down. My local library did not have it, nor any of the other branches. Used bookstores turned up nothing. At last, I checked the campus library catalogue, and they had it, but in off-site storage. However, I ordered it in, and at long last, have gotten to read this only a few months behind my online book club.

My overall impression is that this in an interesting book, but I really want it to be the first in a series. The reason for that is because there are so many issues that are alluded to but not really explored. If there's a later book in which these aspects are more fully developed, then, cool, I liked this a lot. If not, well, then, there's a lot of promise that is just left to wither out on the blasted nuclear desert of this future Earth. (I presume Earth - it's suggested, but I suppose not explicitly said.)

So, here I go, off to wikipedia, to see if there was every any follow-up...and, no. So, knowing that, I feel like this is an okay science fiction book, but needed more development, because some of the ideas are fascinating, but only briefly alluded to and then discarded.

We get that there was nuclear war, and there are survivors. There are people from off-world, though, and perhaps the barest suggestion that they are humans who have been so long out among the stars they aren't quite human any more. However, we never meet them, so we can't find out anything about who they are and how they work. Nor do we find out why they will only deal with the people of one City, and never anyone else.

Nor do we find out why the people of that City seem to hate genetic engineering, nor whether or not they truly do depend on inbreeding to stay alive, and if that is the case, we also don't find out how long that's been going on, or what it has done to their society. We don't know why they might have done so. We don't actually even know if they have done so.

Most of the book is like this, unfortunately, full of promise that doesn't really go anywhere.

The book itself is about a Healer who has managed to be the first in many generations to clone dreamsnakes, a small creature that gives pain relief to those in need, and eases the passage of those who are dying. She also has two terrestrial snakes, engineered to create vaccines, anti-toxins and cures for cancer in their venom. On her first trip out, one of her snakes is killed, and she becomes convinced that she will be cast out if she returns. Of course, when we do meet the people from her village, this seems utterly nonsensical, but it's one more thing that isn't explained.

At the end, she makes a major breakthrough about how dreamsnakes procreate, that challenges everything she knew. She discovers that the dreamsnakes mate in threes, at very cold temperatures. Coming from a diploid race, she'd never thought of three parents.

Which is curious, because it seems that most people on earth have settled down into triads. Virtually everyone we meet in settled relationships are in threes, either two women and one man, or two men and one woman. Given what we come to know about the dreamsnakes, the question is why and how human culture shifted to embrace this. It's fascinating. I want to know more.

But you guessed it! It's never explored.

In my book club, much was made of one triad in which one member is never gendered. Because I'd been forewarned, I was on the lookout for it, although it takes up much less of the book than I'd been expecting. People seemed to make their assumptions both on what they thought of the name, and the characteristics of that character, with people arguing that this or that was a male or female characteristic. (Personally, I've only known female Merediths, so my unconscious assumption was female, but it doesn't really matter. The uncertainty is the point, not the outcome.) It's interesting, and it's certainly something you could entirely not notice, so I'm glad I knew to look for it.

In the long run, this is interesting, and it's promising, and it's so frustrating that it strews these ideas over the ground, and then cultivates them not at all.

Booklinks:

I read this book as part of an attempt to read all the Hugo Nominees