All Clear by Connie Willis

It was perhaps a mistake to wait for so long between Blackout and All Clear. I almost always leave gaps between reading books by the same authors, and it was no different in this case. I knew that this was pretty much one book divided into two parts, but still, I followed the same pattern. This ended up making the start of All Clear more difficult than it might otherwise have been, as the characters and plot were not fresh and recent in my memory.

And the book makes no allowances for that - it's clearly expected you're going to go straight from one into the other. So for the first few chapters, it took me a while to get my feet about who these people were again, and why they were doing what they were doing, exactly.

That meant that the book and I got off on the wrong foot, and it wasn't helped by long swathes of the book in which people just seem to be there to be as irritating and obstructive to the plot as possible, not telling each other information that they and we clearly need to know. At times, it dragged.

This was frustrating, because at other times it was really good, and really clear, and the emotional drive was strong, and things were happening. It's uneven, but there are parts that are as good as anything Willis has ever written.  So I can't say that about the book as a whole is a disappointment.

While I've raved in the past about the way she makes the past feel real (whether or not it would pass muster with a historian), about how she personalizes large traumatic events with characters you genuinely care about, there are some issues with it. To be precise, it's starting to feel like she's gone to the same well too often, and since I know that's something she does on occasion, I'm wary. (Read Lincoln's Dreams and Passage and tell me that the core idea isn't something she's rewriting.)

In this case, though, with the exception of the rapscallion Hodbins, the people in the traumatic event (in this case, the Blitz) that we care about, that are in danger, are the historians themselves. Their drops aren't opening, and they become increasingly sure that they're damaging the timeline by their mere presence, which they think is causing their exile in a very dangerous past.

(It's more complicated than that, thankfully.) It's an excuse to give us a tour of parts of the Blitz and England during the Second World War that would have been too dangerous for these time traveling historians to visit under any other circumstances. It also brings home the fragility of the victory.

But oh, Eileen kept irritating the hell out of me. And the way Polly kept keeping stuff from Eileen so as not to upset her. Sometimes I liked these characters, but often, I wanted to shake them. Hard.

So, in the end, I think this is a solid Connie Willis book, but not one of her best. There are wonderful moments, but also ones that are just plain draggy.

The Sentimentalists by Joanna Skibsrud

I feel like I owe a pre-emptive apology to my book club. This was the book I picked for the next round of reads, as it was coming up on my list, and it was CanLit, and I figured, why not? I felt like Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which I got out of the library at the same time, might be too much to ask. It's not coming around as a read until July, I think, and so, far in advance, I'd like to say "I'm so sorry." And also that we can change it if people want.

I tried, boys and girls, really I did. I valiantly read the whole damn thing. I waded through sentences with so many subordinate clauses that I couldn't remember what the author was trying to say. I read sentences out loud to my husband, he of the M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing and asked if it was just me, or if that was truly a terrible sentence. He always looked at me like I had rocks in my head and said "Megan, that's really bad." He was able to nail down why the prose was so plodding, something to do with the cadence that I don't entirely get, but certainly could intuitively feel.

How, oh how did this win the Giller? It isn't that the subject matter's bad, but the prose that it's told in is so incredibly dull, so incredibly maudlin, so incredibly unintelligible that I have to wonder if people couldn't follow the sentences either and figured this was a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. That they weren't getting it and so it must be brilliant. I have no idea.

This is a case where, just because it's about a "worthy" topic, that does not mean it's a good book.

Again, book club people. I am so sorry.

The main character's father fought in Vietnam, and was pretty much destroyed by it. I guess. I mean, he drinks a lot, and his wife left him, taking their daughters, but other indications of trauma...fine, maybe the alcoholism is enough. I remember one of my father's best friends, though, who was more or less destroyed by his time in Vietnam, and this seems pretty mild to me.

(Is this where I confess that I read this less than a week ago, and I can't remember the main character's name? Or any of the characters' names, except maybe Owen and Henry?)

Her father is American, but ends up living in Ontario with the father of a man he served with in Vietnam, and there...he used to build a boat? He does crossword puzzles? This is a book that mistakes mundanity for profundity. Believe me, I think you can write in such a way that shows the mundane to be more than it seems, but this is not that book.

Is it really that easy to live in another country off the books? Particularly when you have to go back and forth over the border a couple times in one day during a medical emergency?

You know what? I don't care. I don't care about this book, for all it tries to whap us over the head with atrocities in Vietnam in the last twenty pages. Problem is, the rest of the book is so flat they fall flat too. I do not understand how this book won anything. And it's mostly because the prose is virtually unreadable.

"Asteroid of Fear" by Raymond Zinke Gallun

 Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Planet Stories, March 1951

I had a whee of a time reading this story. I'm nearing the end of my dissertation on temperance and masculinity, you see, and so I've spent years and years reading temperance stories and thinking about what they say about manliness and society. So when I found this story, which is not technically a temperance story, it had enough similarities that I almost rubbed my hands together in glee.

Plus, it had the wonderful epithet "hydroponic pun'kinheads." Which I plan to now use on everyone, ever. You have been warned.

Pretty much the only way in which this isn't a temperance tale is that John, the main character, isn't fatally doomed by his addiction to drink, and can, in the end, save himself by proving himself more manly than the others, rather than having to be saved from his terminal lack of will by a child, or a temperance advocate. (Rarely, if ever, a wife.)

John has gotten himself into trouble while drinking on earth, even spending time locked up in jail. While there, of course, it was too much for his long-suffering but always supportive wife Rose to run the farm by herself, and they lost it. (This trope of wife is always long-suffering but unfailingly loving.) So he's signed up the whole family to farm on an asteroid. They're the first settlers on Vesta since the destruction of the alien civilization there eons ago, although there is a mining camp on the other side of the asteroid.

He's trying to stay off the sauce, and so the miners think he's uppity, which quickly swells into anti-farmer homicidal rage. It's so over the top. One, how do they have the time or energy after a long mining shift to spend their sleeping time traversing to the other side of the asteroid and trying to kill John and his family? And why do they hate farmers? Food is kind of at a premium. Whatever, they're the personified forces of degenerated masculinity, out to kill and destroy, and even threaten rape of John's wife and daughter.

John must defend his homestead all by himself. (It's always strange to me - I'm pretty sure Rose could keep a watch too, and if the man must be the one to have the gun, she could wake him up.) The miners come and try to wreck the supplies he needs to live in the airless vacuum of space. (The suits in this story have, it seems, unlimited air.) He knows they'll be back, until his wife emasculates him by calling the cops.

So John gets to get his first crop in, and takes it to the mining camp to sell. Or at least, he would, if he doesn't decide that he needs a drink before he gets any money. This starts a fight, and the most homicidal of the miners tries to kill him, and he knocks him out and drags him back to his dome, where he proves his superior masculinity by...making him eat a whole bushel of tomatoes? This proves his superior control, and breaks the power of the other guy in the eyes of the other miners, as he's shown to be weak.

This story has it all, if you're looking for masculinity - drink, murder, and manly self-control. Of course, a long-suffering wife to set it off. And those miners. Man. They sure are jerks. But at least they aren't hydroponic pun'kinheads.

Telempath by Spider Robinson

  

While we're on the topic of race on the covers of science fiction.... The one on the left is the cover my first copy of this book had, with young Black man Isham Stone facing down Wendell Carlson in the ruins of Columbia University. The one on the right is the reissue cover, and I suppose that could be Wendell Carlson eating a sandwich, but there is a notable lack of Isham Stone. I like the rest of it - the leopard, the skeleton in the park, it's just kind of weird that in the intervening 20 years, Baen books decided that the main character shouldn't be on the cover.

At any rate. Science fiction covers continue to be something I'm interested in. 

But back to this book, which is a very early one by my favourite author of all time, Spider Robinson. As such, it has yet to develop many of the themes that will run so strongly through all of his books, but the seeds of them are there.

The premise is this: 20 years ago, a young idealist decided that cities were what was killing us, that and our removal from the natural world. So he created the Hyperosmic Virus, which swept the world in 48 hours, increasing everyone's sense of smell a hundredfold or more. This emptied the cities, but it also created a lot of people who were unable to cope with the overwhelming sensory input, and became more or less catatonic. Far more people than he had intended to kill, died. And that was before the War started, between people and the airborne creatures known as the Muskies, which were now identifiable by smell, and suddenly, distinctly homicidal. 

Young Isham Stone was brought up by his father to be the Hand of Man, to hunt and execute Wendell Carlson, who created the virus. To do so, he ventured into the largest stink of them all - New York City, long deserted. In the process, this book looks at the stickiness of vengeance, and the tension that might exist between those who long to have civilization back, and those who see in the greatest collective trauma in human history a warning of what not to do. 

Spider strikes a chord here between a blanket assumption that everything would be hunky-dory in the new hippie utopia, and the idea that what we need to do to fix things is to reindustrialize with better noseplugs. 

This isn't his best, but I always find that it holds up remarkably well. When my husband read it, he thought that at least one part of the ending was trying too hard to be optimistic, and I can see what he means, but I like it nonetheless. We see early threads of Spider's interest in telepathy, but more than that, his ideas on what we would need for a truly sane society. I am always persuaded. Particularly since it still includes ice cream.

The Week In Stories - March 24

Well, gaming got cancelled once, and for one of the shows I regularly watch, I was busy making baklava instead of Ollie running around Starling City. (The baklava turned out extremely well, so I regret nothing!) But this might be a shorter entry than usual.

TV

The Flash - "Out of Time"

Ho-ly shit. That's all I have to say. So many things happened, and although the end of the episode seems to say it might be reversible, there were still big bold moves! A main character was killed, and it was heartbreaking! (Although my husband has a comics-based argument for why what appeared to be getting killed might actually manifest his superpowers.) Joe was kidnapped and beaten up. The police chief is in a coma and has brain damage. (And we finally got to meet his fiance, who was mentioned way back at the start of the season.) Barry came clean about his secret identity to Iris.

Now I guess we have to see how much they let of what happened stand as Barry loops himself in time. I hope they let some of it stay, although I really don't want to lose the character who got killed. But eep! This show keeps making bold moves, and not leaving any of its story on the table. I applaud that.

Agents of SHIELD - "One of Us"

Kyle MacLachlan gets another chance to do batshit crazy, and it is certainly entertaining. He's determined to show his daughter that he's the stable one who loves her, and does a really terrible job of it, what with threatening to kill an entire town in the process. Also, Blair Underwood has not aged in, it appears, decades. I hope he's a recurring character, because his psychologist was remarkably free of the crazy.

The reveal at the end was small, but pretty damn creepy. Good job.

Roleplaying

Paper Dolls

The only roleplaying game in the last couple of weeks, as two of my Shakespeare, VA games got cancelled - one due to me being sick, and one due to a player not being up to it. So everything's been focused on our weird multiple universes game, which appears to be drawing to a close, and we've finally figured out an endgame.

This is one where almost all the drama is interpersonal, but we needed some sort of threat at the end, and it occurred to me at last week that perhaps the scientists who split the three worlds apart 20 years ago might be trying to figure out how to smoosh them back together again. Which raises interesting questions about what would happen to our characters, of whom there are three versions apiece, or to all the children born in the last 20 years? We've had to think about which of our characters would fight on each side.

I have one who is just broken and full of self-loathing enough that she might want to destroy herself and the world she lives in. I think almost everyone else will fight to preserve the split, because even though it caused a great deal of emotional and physical trauma, that's not exactly a good reason to cause a second trauma. Plus, one of my characters has a baby, who she'll fight to save, and the other has a ton of nieces and nephews she adores.

We'll probably wrap it up within a session or two, but it's been an interesting experiment!

The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay

New York in the 19th century, the slums, and prostitution. That is the milieu McKay is trying to invoke in this book, and, well, it's not bad. I was never eager to get back to reading this book, but I never minded picking it up, either. If it feels a bit superficial, it also is stronger when it comes to villains than McKay's earlier work.

My main complaint about The Birth House was that while the good characters were likeable, the bad characters were beyond caricatures. She's gotten better at that. At the same time, there's still just something lacking here. It's not terrible, but this feels like it's a book written to be a bestseller, if that makes any sense. But for all that, it's good at what it does.

The main character is a girl named Moth (strangely, that's the same name we gave to our street urchin (male) character in a story-by-email two friends and I have been writing.) She's sold by her mother to be a ladies maid, but finds her new employer to be rather sadistic and obsessed with wrecking Moth's good looks so that her husband can't pay attention to them.

Moth escapes and runs back to her old home, to find it empty, and in the process of trying to survive on New York's mean streets, ends up in the house of a woman of moderately ill repute, who specializes in high-end whores, well-off clientele, and specifically, in selling the virginity of her charges for a hefty fee. Moth is pampered and taken care of and paraded in this place, while the female doctor who sees the prostitutes tries to convince Moth to escape before that day can come.

So I guess, in as much as there are themes, it's about relations between women, help and sabotage both, but I never really felt like there was anything deep there to say. Moth is an interesting character, and her intense need to survive and thrive are well done. There's a digression into a high-class freakshow that is interesting as well, but are we trying to say that independent women are themselves the freakshow at the time? Sometimes it seems to be the case.

I don't know. I feel bad that I don't have anything deeper to say about the book. There are books that I read that spark a million ideas a minute, that make me sit my husband down and prattle on to him about books he's never even read and probably never will. They provoke thought. This book does not. It's an enjoyable read, despite the fact that it's about fairly horrible practices. But it's all surface.

For surface, it's good, and if you want to read a book that doesn't make you think more deeply about this than to say "wow, poverty in the past was horrible, and these people did horrible things", then this is the book for you. It's not a book, though, that will provoke you to think about how that might compare to poverty in the present, or sex work and its exigencies, or the persistence of practices, or really, anything.

I'm being hard on Ami McKay for having written a book that I think is probably a crowd-pleaser. It's because it's good at what it does that I want to to be better. I want it to make me think, instead of trying to fill me up all by itself.

The Spark by Kristine Barnett

I really expected to hate this book. Or at least, to be fairly unmoved by it. The first few chapters did nothing to disabuse me of that notion, as they felt like too rounded a tale. All the edges seemed to have been filed off, making a story that was palatable for what people wanted to hear about autism, or about life with a child with a disability, or just, quite frankly, feel-good, glad-it's-not-me pablum.

It is to the book's credit that I ended up liking it more than I was expecting. It didn't set my world on fire, I'm not telling everyone to run out and read it, but honestly, it slowly won me over to being at least bearable, with a couple of sections that rang very true to me, even though my own interactions with people with autism have been limited to knowing the men my father worked with.

On the other hand, this is one of those books where you look in disbelief at the author, wondering where she gets the energy. I for one, do not have it. Would not have it. And like a certain amount of time for contemplation and relaxation. Maybe it would be different if I was under the immense kinds of pressure you find in this book, but having been under my own versions of those, I think I'd be more likely to head for a nervous breakdown.

So yeah, it's one of those books that makes you feel inadequate in your own life. But I've come to terms with that, and would indeed fight for a reassessment of how much pressure we put on ourselves. If there are things you have to do, absolutely. It's the optional things you can have some control over, and "doing nothing" is a good option every once in a while.

That aside, this is the story of a mom with a child with autism who came up with her own methods for getting him reintegrated into normal classrooms, where, it turns out, he's a super-genius and started college at age 11. But she isn't saying that will be the result in all or even the majority of cases, but it does make a nice hook to write a bestseller on, doesn't it?

At any rate, her ideas have some core values that I ended up agreeing with far more than I thought I would - the necessity for play, even in the middle of intensive work. And strengths-based learning, which is something I think as a society we're very bad at, but apparently very bad at in particular when it comes to kids with autism, where much of the emphasis is on what they can't do.

There are sections here where I wanted my Dad back, and I always want that, but I specifically wanted him back so we could have some more conversations about the education system, and how he thought it was designed to kill a genuine love of learning, instead of fostering it. I don't necessarily disagree. I thrived on it, because it's would be impossible to kill my love of learning with a weedwhacker, but the older I get, the more I see what he was saying. And how hard it would be, how many more great, energetic teachers it would take to do that kind of intensive, directed teaching. It sucks, and I don't see an answer, but I like to dream about it, because I'm not sure we're doing it well now.

I thought Barnett had interesting things to say about that, and the ways in which focusing on areas of strength, and making time for them, also helped in all other areas as well. The other was the importance of the tactile, of doing things consciously that are sense-based, rooting ourselves. This didn't even come mostly in the context of kids with autism, but in a story she relates about a man overwhelmed by supporting his family through his wife's cancer. It hit home in a big way. I spend so much time in my head, and it's good to have the reminder to take the time to be in my body as well.

I don't know what parents of kids with autism would make of this, and while I certainly am not touting it as the answer to all life's problems, or even a great book, I did find enough small bits of wisdom that I stopped resenting it and started enjoying it.