Thoughts on March

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Wolverina

I’ve finished two books in March so far and am on track to finish a third, all by women. This is a little unusual for me, I wasn’t reading much last year or the beginning of this year with everything that happened. It helped that both the finished novels, Hild by Nicola Griffiths and Kindred by Octavia Butler, are excellent and engaging. Both are very much about looking at the past. The novel I’m still finishing up, Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, is amazing, it’s gotta be close to my favourite novel I’ve read in a long time and easily the most sophisticated. It’s crowding my thoughts of the other two out somewhat.

Kindred is quite a sharp to-the-point book about Dana, a young black woman being dragged back into the past of pre-civil war Maryland as a sort of guardian angel for her white slave-owner past. Butler has a clear no-nonsense voice, even for complicated subjects. I love how she can manage to allow the reader the option to hide from her meaning by obfuscating. If something is horrific she shows exactly, unflinchingly how horrific.The book is a lesson in the effects of cruelty, both as outright violence and the damage in hiding the past. The settings and time-travel tropes are as far from romanticised as possible, which was a relief.

The thing is though, I read it for a genre book club I go to. It’s a (mostly) male, (nearly all) white group and I think most are significantly older than me. It didn’t help that an aspect of the book that I really admired was the writing’s comparisons of Dana’s husband Kevin to the slave-owners Rufus and Weylin. There are uncomfortable parallels that I think others in the group found too easy to dismiss in favour of a ‘the husband wasn’t a bad bloke’ line of thought. Frustrating.

Hild is a very different sort of book to love. It’s not biting criticism, but it is critical in its look at history. The book is super slow paced, it’s not really one to eat up in a sitting but one to read a chapter or so a night (for me anyway). I loved the attention to detail given to all aspects, especially the value and emphasis on the importance of cloth and yarn to trade and power. It’s about how women made and found themselves places of power and were active in creating events that changed history. Hild takes its subject – St Hilda’s early life, where she grew up in her uncle’s court – and documents her early life and her transformation into a seer, portraying this as the result of the competence and brilliance of herself and the women around her. I completely absorbed it.

io9 did a pretty decent review calling it “skeptical fantasy” and “also a brilliantly-researched work of historical fiction”. It’s both, but I’d probably go further, the skepticism extends throughout the historical content of the book, constantly challenging more traditional historical narratives.Or at least, it does to me, but I am not a historian.

I think I’m growing to like historical narratives and fiction more and more, with or without speculative aspects. These books, alongside Sarah Waters’ fiction earlier in the year, watching The Borgias, Agent Carter and The Musketeers. Up to a week ago I was obsessively working through the Assassin’s Creed games and associated media (now edged out for Guild Wars 2). The end of last year had me increasingly bitter at the science fiction community, earlier in the year bored and frustrated by the comics community so it’s nice to find work slightly to the side of my usual interests that I still find engaging.

Swancon: After Buffy

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Wolverina

So Swancon! That science fiction convention I was on the committee on and helped run.
Have a picture taken by Arinellen from the XXP bloggers shows my approach to event management.

I was pretty worn out at this point.

I ran one panel at Swancon this year, leading the feral group I call my ‘craft day’ friends: Penny, Nic, Emma and Sarah F. Sadly, I didn’t think to grab pictures of this set up. Basically, these are friends from a few years back, when I decided I wanted to start up an informal crafting meet-up at my house every couple of weeks. These are the friends that kept showing up, even though we very quickly stopped crafting and just started watching tv, arguing and recommending other media to each other.

The panel After Buffy, was an attempt at moving past the main few action women in the modern consciousness. When people talk about awesome women, strong women, and female action heroes, what you quickly notice is that Buffy, Ripley, Sarah Connor and Lara Croft are the names that keep coming up and dominating the conversation with their various merits rather than diversifying the list. It becomes a battle for perfection, rather than finding loads of role models.

I promised we’d put a list of the recommendations online as we didn’t get time to mention many of the creators and texts that we wanted. These aren’t all SF or action, but whatever we thought had the potential to showcase women being awesome, whether the work itself was terrible or brilliant. They are things we’ve recommended to each other, discussed loads or watched in a group.

TV and Movies

Cliff Chiang’s take on The Runaways.

Xena
Lost Girl
Birds of Prey
Rizzoli & Isles
Hope Springs
The Runaways (the movie)
But I’m A Cheerleader
Kamikaze Girls
Tank Girl
Daria
Itty Bitty Titty Committee
Middleman
Brave
Tangled

Books and Authors

Barbara Hambly
Jane Yolen
Ursula Le Guin
Joanna Russ
Lucy Sussex
Cherie Priest
Cat Valente
Vonda N. McIntyre
Marianne De Pierres
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Gael Baudino, Gossamer Axe
Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique

Comics

Not actually sure who drew this Painkiller Jane. She is amazing.

Gail Simone
Alison Bechdel
Jen Van Meter
Faith Erin Hicks
Wonder Woman (Greg Rucka, Gail Simone)
’92/93 Black Canary (Sarah Byam)
Queen & Country (Greg Rucka)
Painkiller Jane (Jimmy Palmiotti)
Digger (Ursula Vernon)
Passage of Time
Catwoman (Ed Brubaker)
Powergirl (Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Amanda Connor)
Manhunter (Marc Andreyko)
X-23 (Marjorie Liu)
Captain Marvel (Kelly Sue DeConnick)
Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)

The panel itself went really well. Surprisingly well. We came third in the best-in-program contest which is pretty wicked, and we weren’t expecting the crowd we got. We were also impressed that we managed to only upset one person (we’re really sorry, Kendra!) with how opinionated and overboard we tend to go. The vibe was really good too. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at a panel, and the impression I’ve gotten is many people felt the same. The vibe continued into the next panel (on queer representation) with the recommending spirit continuing onwards.

The audience was pretty awesome. At the time, we weren’t expecting such an awesome discussion from the audience, or the number of people that showed up. We’ve managed to get most of the notes (borrowing heavily from alias_sqbr for this post). Note: I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of these recs and I can’t guareentee we didn’t miss a whole heap.

Amy Reeder’s take on Batwoman

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Batwoman
The Legend of Korra
Girls with Slingshots
Questionable Content
The Princess Diaries series (especially 2)
Tank Girl
Girl Genius
Ash
Fables
Batgirl
Ice Princess
Global Frequency
Runaways (the comic)

I did notice a fixation on the princess tropes and roles that subvert or bring in alternative roles. Personally I think the princess trope just needs to be burned to the ground and erased from the media’s collective consciousness alongside Barbie and cheerleaders (even subverted ones like Buffy). However, the panel and certainly members of the audience disagreed with me and there was no shortage of suggestions. I still wonder if the reason we defend these princesses is that we have so few other characters to form attachments to.

Possible idea for a future panel? One not run by me, I’ve sworn I’m out after this round.

Full credit needs to go to Lily for pointing out that we completely missed Batwoman. She won a signed copy of Boneshaker by Cherie Priest – while there were millions of good suggestions from the audience, this was the most obvious character and comic we missed.

We’re always after suggestions, and people should feel free to keep mentioning stuff in the comments.

Thoughts on Strozza

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Wolverina

It’s been several books and I still haven’t decided how I feel about Charles Stross’ work. This seems kind of important as well – I’m helping to run Swancon 2013* and Strozza** will be one of our headline guests. I figured I should probably have an opinion about him that isn’t just “He runs a pretty sweet blog”.

My introduction to Strozza was Glasshouse, via the university SF club’s bookclub. I mostly remember Glasshouse for the girl I have a massive ridiculous crush on ranting for hours about dualism and how the basic premise of the book is wrong. Ah, hot philosophy students, I love you guys.*** Even, it turns out, to the point of forgetting half a book I want to write about.

I enjoyed it well enough though. The idea of using gamification to criticize suburbia and 20th century gender roles was fun, and it was clever enough, if not exactly groundbreaking. I mean, wow, the role of suburban housewife is depressing and awful, even for a man (literally) stuck in a woman’s body! Who’d have thought?

Something something, men shouldn’t throw stones, something something. All wit here today guys.

Halting State was next. A friend loaned me a copy which had a recommendation from one of the creators of Doom and Quake on the cover.

If nothing else, I love the pixel art on the cover.

The first couple of pages had me hooked and I didn’t touch another book until I finished.

John Carmack

So you know, sold.

It’s mostly a fun and entertaining book, a murder mystery with a cyberpunk twist, with real and virtual worlds becoming integrated. There are reviews commenting, amongst other things, on the early 90s style in the idea of VR goggles. But really, sunnies that provided an online overlay over the real world seemed quite sensible to me, and the comments seemed to be missing the bigger picture. It did lack quite a lot though – it was overlong, had an annoying tone and some fucking disgusting characters that put me right off.

Polyester Girl

On the other hand, Saturn’s Children and Accelerando were fucking amazing. Saturn’s Children in particular had me absolutely captivated. I am completely in love with its universe and still so smitten that I can’t even begin to try and organise my thoughts coherently enough to review, let alone analyse competently, the book. So I guess I’ll leave that as really fucking high praise here, and save an actual critique for some other post. The flaw was the strength of the ending though.

Really, the trouble with Strozza is just how fucking smug some of his writing is. This especially goes for Halting State, less so for Saturn’s Children and Accelerando. Don’t get me wrong: in some ways that smugness is well deserved. He does write a very good, intelligent story. He also writes, when he wants to, very interesting, if not always likeable, human and nonhuman characters. And the ideas are clever. It’s just that sometimes, they’re not quite clever enough to justify the smugness. Part of this is probably my English student wanker coming in here, but I just don’t see a reason, if you are going to be show-off, to be so freaking obvious and unsubtle about it. Unless, maybe, you’re damn sure noone is going to be able to see what you did there, but then half the arrogance should be flying over our heads as well.

Originally, when trying to put this post together, the notes I had were over three pages long, so I’m going to stop here for now. I haven’t even gotten into any deep and meaningful substance from these books, and there is a lot of substance there, let alone the discussion on post-cyberpunk Strozza’s work seems to create. To give the vaguest overview, themes lean heavily towards post-humanism, transhumanism, postmodernism and explorations of gender and queer theories. The books are heavy on the intertextual references too, and use a huge amount of high-concept scientifics (that may or may not be bluffed) to push plots and characters foward. Strozza even mostly manages to avoid the books getting bogged down in this.

Right, I was going to stop. For a final thought, the fact I can’t stop spewing out a mess of thoughts in every direction about each book is a good sign. I’ve gained an understanding of why all the academics I know seem to be enamoured, yet I can also understand why people who just want fun SF-action love him as well.

I’d still rather not have been left so irritated though.

* Yes, I still haven’t worked on that website. Shuddup, I’mma volunteer. A very tired, nearly burned out one.
** It’s a long story. Basically for some reason I always want to hear Stross’s name in a rural Aussie accent. Hence Strozzzzzaaaahhh.
*** Hot student is in fact much smarter than me (and is currently doing her PhD in something sciencey). We are also good friends and the jokes about objectifying her go all sorts of ways.

Malafrena

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Wolverina

I finished this book yesterday. It won’t get out of my head.

I have no fucking idea what to say about it.

It’s difficult for me to describe this book. It has been by far the hardest book I’ve read in a long time. I don’t know whether its because of my tiredness recently making Le Guin’s prose more difficult to parse, or whether her normally flowing words are made more stilted by the genre change. It is after all, as the back of the book says:

Le Guin’s triumphant debut in mainstream fiction.

Triumphant? Maybe. Written in 1979, it does seem to lack the staying power of her other (and there are many) triumphant SF books. But then, I am mostly out of touch with both the literary and ‘mainstream’ fiction circles, so maybe it still is.

It really doesn’t help that I don’t know enough 19th century European history to have any context at all for this novel. I had no idea about whether this was alternative history or historical fiction for most of the book, which is to its detriment. It is one of the few things Le Guin wrote in this setting, I believe the only other being her short stories, the Orsinian Tales.

I should probably back up a little at this point. Malafrena is essentially an alternative history about a fictional country under the control of Austria, post Napoleon. It’s a very detailed book, imitating that kind of 19th century prose and styling, with long descriptions of characters and surroundings as well as ever-long discussions by various old men drinking. The pace often matches the provincial setting of the title’s country manor. I kept falling asleep and wanting to give up for the first half of the novel, there was so much dullness and naivete.

Thematically the book is a rich mix of cautionary revolution tale, with ideas of home, family and growing up, tied into an exploration of whether it is better to die free or live a slave. That’s not the whole story – a good portion of the book questions what freedom actually is, a question that is never really answered.

Overall it’s beautiful, it’s horrible, it’s fascinating but I don’t know if I like it. It is the worst of Le Guin’s books and I hate it for how empty it left me. It is the best of her books because while the first half was slow, the second half captured me utterly and won’t go the hell away.

I preferred The Word for World is Forest, though. I still haven’t found any words at all to describe how I feel about that book other than a grossly simplistic ‘like Avatar but good’ comparison.

Asimov’s Robotics

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Wolverina

I don't actually know what the fuck this cover image has to do with the content

At my parents’ I read Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, after picking it up when I was looking around my local library, which is pretty fucking sparse when it comes to decent SF. I am reliably informed by goodreads that it’s the third in a series of Robot novels.

It’s funny how easy it is to forget how clever a lot of the Robot works are. They’re flawed, especially in a way that the gender and identity politicians among you must despise the Golden Age of SF for. However in that regard this text is hardly atypical for the era so critiquing an individual work on just that basis would be pointless for me and this blog.

I’m also not talking about the often-mentioned wisdom in the Three Laws of Robotics – don’t get me wrong, they’re very cool – but in the end, they’re nothing more than an easy framework in which to present a discussion of logic and flaws in programming abilities. It’s a discussion which can be fun to read, but as a product of the computer age, its unnecessary for me.

What really struck me about this book is the appropriateness of its allegory of ‘viewing’ to the internet age.

‘But about the other thing,’ she went on earnestly, ‘it’s just viewing you see. After all, you didn’t mind talking to me when I was in the drier and I wasn’t wearing anything then, either.’
‘Well,’ said Baley, wishing she would run down as far as that subject was concerned, ‘hearing you is one thing, and seeing you is another.’
‘But that’s exactly it. Seeing isn’t involved.’ She reddened a trifle and looked down. ‘I hope you don’t think I’d ever do anything like that. I mean, just step out of the drier, if anyone were seeing me. It was just viewing.’
‘Same thing, isn’t it?’ said Baley.
‘Not at all the same thing. You’re viewing me right now. You can’t touch me, can you, or smell me, or anything like that. You could if you were seeing me. Right now, I’m two hundred miles away from you at least. So how can it be the same thing?’
Baley grew interested. ‘But I see you with my eyes.’
‘No, you don’t see me. You see my image. You’re viewing me.’
‘And that makes a difference?’
‘All the difference there is.’

Chapter 5, pg 52-53

This idea of screens, and how you are perceived. This difference between viewing (visiting each other through what is essentially wireless video telephone) and seeing (IRL). This idea that it’s not real, or as important, to see someone through a camera lens. It’s an interesting idea. Certainly its relatable to a lot of the fascination and strange behaviour associated with camwhoring and chatroutlette etc. Take the different planets for ideas of different classes and you start to get some interesting (if a little predictable) comments on society. The matter-of-fact portrayal of this foresight especially draws my interest, how it is part of the everyday.

The story itself is nothing spectacular. It’s a typical robotics story, with Asimov mixing it up a little into the detective genre, complete with the old-fashioned “gather everyone in the one room and have your reveal” in the tradition of Doyle and Christie. It’s a fun and satisfying read, and most of the world building is interesting enough in that “dawwwwwww, 50 years ago people’s visions of the future” way. It has to be the most domestic of the Asimov books that I’ve read, in that pretty much every scene of this book is set in households and children’s creche equivalents, but unfortunately he does little of note with this.

I have to admit, this post is as an excuse to quote a few paragraphs that I found quite interesting. I don’t have that much in the way of clever commentary about either the book or the subject I have brought up. There’s more to be said here with this idea of images and viewing, as well as other topics within the book such as the child raising system later in the book, but I’ll leave that for someone more analytical than myself, I think.

Where I Discover Online Bookclubs

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Wolverina

Thanks to an offhand mention someone made in a Galactic Suburbia podcast, I found out about the Women’s SF and Women’s Fantasy 2011 online bookclubs. So I thought I’d join in!

Unfortunately, due to April being completely out of control I only got to read The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and even that I finished a week late (hopefully when I head over to the discussion post after writing this there will still be some discussion happening). This was not helped by my e-reader freezing in the middle of the novel.

As a warning, some versions of the cover have a huge spoiler on the front.

I’ve already read one of Willis’ other books set in the same universe: To Say Nothing Of The Dog. Both it and The Doomsday Book have the same basic plot mechanism of someone trapped in the past after an academic ‘fieldtrip’ has gone wrong. The Doomsday Book is a much stronger novel, in my opinion both thematically and in prose. It features a young female student trapped in the medieval period with all its diseases and no support crew while an infection and incompetence prevent the people in the ‘present’ from being able to locate or save her. The ending was rather unexpected, if only in the sense that I really didn’t expect anyone to have survived.

The draw in the stories isn’t really the plot; you can guess a lot of what happens in the novels beforehand. The world Willis has created isn’t really a draw either for me: a place where time travel is used exclusively for academia and is oddly lacking in mobile phones (I suspect this one of the main aspects that has dated the book) and incredibly Eurocentric isn’t really my thing.

However, Willis’ writing style and slightly off-kilter narration to the story is amazing, as is her ability to make entertaining the attention to the mind-numbing detail and bureaucracy that is constantly shuffling along in front of the main characters as they try to take action and prevent disaster from unfolding. Analysis of language and style isn’t really my strong point in literary criticism, but I can recognise that the way Willis held my attention. I was unable to put the bloody book down, to the point where I nearly cried when my Kobo froze. She also manages to contrast a relentless refusal to de-brutalise the medieval age with absurd imagery of malfunctioning academia and the behaviour of young children (such as Colin’s endless gobstopper).

I didn’t cry during reading this book though! According to some reports I’ve heard, this makes me a terrible person, but really, Willis’ no-nonsense approach and refreshing lack of melodrama, despite featuring a main character that in a lesser novel would have spent her entire time angsting and getting the menfolk to help her, left me in kind of shocked awe where I couldn’t cry, just kept struggling on with the book.

An excellent novel that I would definitely recommend, it deals with horrific events in both the past and (possible) future and while it takes pains not to soften the terrible tragedy, its attention to detail, emotion and struggle gives it a real human warmth. An impressive mixture of an incredibly readable style and traumatic content. So yeah, if you haven’t already Connie Willis is an author well worth seeking out.

Where big words are used

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Wolverina

I’m going to have to apologise, y’all. I was planning on writing a smart-alec foul-mouthed snark at a text, but then I finished this book and, well, it’s a grown-up book and deserves an attempt at a grown-up review.

I have to admit this was mostly bought because I love these SF Masterwork covers.

I’d never heard of Cordwainer Smith till I picked up The Rediscovery of Man as part of my consumerist quest to have as many as possible of the older SF Masterworks books. It contains a series of short stories all set in the same future universe, at different periods in time and societal development. To be honest I wasn’t expecting much, but I wound up amazed and hooked.

It helps that Smith’s writing is perfect for a geography nerd such as myself. The stories cover different stages of future development in an expanding space empire, a purposeful allegory to colonialism, however it doesn’t just stop there. Moving throughout the various stages of development allows Smith to explore many of his themes, human adaptation, pioneering women, war, technical improvements, fights for equality as well as banishment and punishment for crime. These are all explored through a variety of points of views, across many different settings, allowing a complex understanding through relatively simple tales.

The theme of societal stagnation in the face of immortality and predictability as an exploration into what is needed for happiness was easily my favourite theme in a few of the latter stories and appeared to have the most imaginative handling. That said, the binary assumption that life needs death for meaning is an idea I think I’m getting a little tired of.

This isn’t your usual Star Trek-esque feel-good colonial ‘help the savages’ exploration fortunately. Smith uses his ‘underpeople’ as a metaphor for race, their animal origins an uncomfortable reminder, for me a white Australian, of how other races were* treated in British expansion and settlement. Some of these stories do ‘fail’ a little, but I certainly felt that often the flaws were a result of combining too many layers of metaphor and too many thoughts into relatively short and concise stories exploring too many issues. The main surprise, really, is how well and implicitly most of the themes have been built into the universe, rather than the awkwardly explicit tacked-on feel many well-intentioned stories attempting these themes have.

Even the most problematic story is still thought-provoking and ambiguous enough to work for a more modern reader, I think. Titled ‘The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal’, the plot centres around the idea of a planet in which ‘femininity becomes carcinogenic’ creating a one-gendered world. The story, on the surface, appears surprisingly homophobic and transphobic, and is somewhat out of place among the other stories. I’m not sure if this is a case where Smith was intending an allegory that is now a little lost as an unintentional but more literal meaning has been created/made more obvious through time, or it’s genuinely hateful in theme. In any case, I’ve read the story twice over and I’m still confused as to what the moral actually was, so I’m hesitant to be too harsh.

You can see how his stories influenced other writers too. The cover has quotes from Pratchett, Baxter and Le Guin telling everyone how inspiring and inventive his stories are. It’s not exactly a great stretch to compare the above story about a planet on which there is only one gender to Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, and I’m sure a more detailed comparison would show more of its influence over the Hanish Cycle novels. This is probably a large part of the reason why I enjoyed these stories so much, actually – it’s that the grains of much greater stories are there were waiting to be developed beyond just colonialist allegory, even one as sophisticated as this one is.

I’m a little afraid I got too caught up in this book to be properly critical, I’d love to hear or read what other people have thought of Smith’s writing.

(*) I am using the past tense in a sort of wistful hope here.

SF Book meme

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Wolverina

Okay I’m currently ill and have a fuzzy head, so the substantial post I was working on is not going to be written any time soon. I did however find a new (or recycled?) meme over on facebook that was interesting, so when the app kept crashing on my laptop I decided to fill it in here.

I’m too tired for adding any real opinions to these books, but at least this way it gives some a bit of SF context my other critiques. I will say that I was surprised at the number of people who hadn’t read The Left Hand of Darkness and A Fire Against The Deep on the original meme though. Both these books have their flaws but they are absolutely amazing SF despite or because of this and people who haven’t read them are missing out.

Feel free to point out any books you think are missing or over-rated btw. This blog doesn’t get nearly enough discussion.
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