Pixel Scroll 5/19/16 I Am Not In The Scroll Of Common Men

(1) DATA AND YAR AT TANAGRA. Seattle’s EMP Museum is opening Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds to the public on May 21. Tickets required.

Plus, be among the first to visit Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds and get an up-close look at more than 100 artifacts and props from the five Star Trek television series, spin-offs, and films, including set pieces from the original series like Captain Kirk’s command chair and the navigation console (on display for the first time to the public); Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and McCoy original series costumes; and the 6-foot U.S.S. Enterprise filming model from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Opening day is also when Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar) and Brent Spiner (Data) will appear – additional charge for photos and autographs, naturally.

(2) OMAZE WINNER. SFWA’s Director of Operations Kate Baker learned during the Nebula conference that she was the Omaze winner, and will join Chris Pratt on the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 set.

Tired and sweaty after hours of work, I sat down to check my phone as we planned to grab something to eat. There in my Twitter feed was a message from a new follower; Omaze. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the company, they partner with a celebrity and charity, design a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a random donor, (and here is the most important part) — raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for deserving charities around the world….

I quickly followed them back and responded. That’s when I found out that I was a finalist for the grand prize and to satisfy their partners and sponsors, they wanted to do a short Skype interview that evening.

Unable to contain my excitement, I rushed around my room, curling my hair, refreshing make-up, doing cartwheels, moving furniture, opening blinds, you know — normal things.

As 6:00 CST hit, I took a deep breath and answered the call….. That’s when they sprung the surprise.

 

(3) CLARKE AHEAD. Award Director Tom Hunter has posted at Medium “14 ways I’m thinking about the future of the Arthur C. Clarke Award”.

8. Governance & succession planning

As mentioned in my section on charitable status, the Clarke Award is currently administered by just 3 volunteers. Could we do more if we had more people involved?

A fair few people have promoted themselves to me as viable candidates over the years, but while many have been keen to have a say in the running of the award (or just like telling me they could do a better job with it) right now one of the reasons the award has weathered its troubles so well has been because of our ability to move faster on key decisions than a continual vote by committee model would likely have allowed us.

Still, as I look to the future again, there are many potential advantages to be gained from our increasing our board membership, not least the fact that when I first took this role a decade ago I only planned to stay for 5 years.

I changed my mind back then because of the need to build a new financial resilience into the award to keep it going, but one day sooner or later I intend to step down after I’ve recruited my replacement.

Padawans wanted. Apply here.

(4) ANTIQUE ZINE. This APA-L cover by Bea Barrio glowed in the dark when it was originally made – in the 1970s. Wonder if it still does?

https://twitter.com/highly_nice/status/732782065591160833

(5) MASKED MEN. Comic Book Resources boosts the signal: “Dynamite Announces ‘The Lone Ranger Meets the Green Hornet: Champions of Justice”.

What is the connection between the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet? Dynamite Entertainment’s new “The Lone Ranger Meets the Green Hornet: Champions of Justice” series has the answer. CBR can exclusively reveal that writer Michael Uslan and artist Giovanni Timpano are reuniting for the new series, a crossover 80 years in the making.

According to an official series description,

The first chapter, entitled “Return With Us Now,” creates a world of carefully researched alternative history in 1936. Readers will learn whatever happened to The Lone Ranger and discover his familial link to the emergence of a man who is a modern day urban version of The Lone Ranger himself. What is the blood connection of The Green Hornet to The Lone Ranger? What is the link of Olympic runner Jesse Owens to The Green Hornet? What role does Bat Masterson play in The Lone Ranger’s New York adventure? What intense rift tears a family apart just when America desperately needs a great champion of justice? The shocking answers lie in the landmark new series ‘The Lone Ranger Meets the Green Hornet: Champions of Justice!’

(6) DEARLY BELOVED. Lit Brick has done a comic about “If you were a dinosaur, my love”.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born May 19, 1944 — Before Peter Mayhew was Chewy he was Minaton in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, his first role.

Peter Mayhew in character

(8) FLORSCHUTZ OUT. Max Florschutz explains why he pulled his book from a contest: Unusual Events Has Been Removed From SPFBO 2016”.

All right, guys, it’s official. I just heard back from Mark Lawrence, the head of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, and now that the competition has begun, my book could not be moved to another reviewer, so instead, I’ve elected to withdraw my entry from the competition (for the reasons for doing so, see this post here). It’s sad that it had to be done, but I feel my reasons were sound.

Florschutz outlined reasons for asking for his book to be reassigned in a previous post, “When Did Ethnicity and Sex Become the Most Important Thing?”

Bear with me for a moment, and take a look at these few excerpts from a book review I read this morning, posted on a fantasy review blog (which you can find here, though I’m loathe to give them a link after perusing the site since it’s a little messed up). I’d been poking around the place since they are a participating member of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, a contest between 300 different self-published fantasy books, and Unusual Events is one of those titles. This site is the one that will be handling Unusual Events review.

I’m not sure how I feel about that now. In fact, I may request to have it passed to another site, since I’m pretty sure I can already see how its going to go. Because I’ve been reading their other reviews, and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Let’s look at some quotes:

Otherbound is that last sort of book.

I’m fairly certain I discovered it on Tumblr, recommended by one of those blogs which include lists of books that are commendable for their diversity.

Okay, that’s … interesting. A little background on the title. I guess that’s important? Let’s see what happens if we go further.

… fantasy novels are written by and about (and quite possibly for) white men who like running around with swords saving the world.

Uh-oh. Okay. Sensing a theme here, but—

As I said, it’s an incredible story, and honestly, I’d probably have loved the book even if both of the leads were white and straight.

Wait, what?

So they’re saying that it’s also likely that they wouldn’t have liked the book had the main characters been, to use their own words “white and straight”? The book would be inferior simply because of the color of the main character’s skin or their sexual orientation?

….Now, to get back to something I said earlier, I’m considering contacting the SPFBO 2016 ringleaders and asking to have my book moved to another reviewer. And no, it’s not because my book is “… written by and about (and quite possibly for) white men who like running around with swords saving the world.” because it isn’t. But more because now I know that there’s a very high chance that that fact is what the reviewer is going to fixate on regardless. My sex, and my ethnic heritage, as well as that of the characters I wrote, is going to matter to her more than the rest of what’s inside the book’s pages. More than the stories those characters experience, the trials that they undergo.

(9) TEACHING WRITING. “’Between Utter Chaos and Total Brilliance.’ Daniel José Older Talks About Teaching Writing in the Prison System” – a set of Older’s tweets curated by Leah Schnelbach at Tor.com.

(10) PURSUED. David M. Perry profiles Older at Pacific Standard “Daniel José Older and Progressive Science Fiction After Gamergate”.

The Internet trolls picked a bad week to call Daniel José Older “irrelevant.” As we meet in the opulent lobby of the Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago, his young-adult book Shadowshaper is sitting on a New York Times bestseller list. He’s in town because the book was been nominated for the Andre Norton Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America, which is holding its annual Nebula conference in Chicago. Best of all, he’s just signed a contract for two sequels. There’s also his well-reviewed adult fiction, the “Bone Street Rumba” series. By no standard of publishing is this person irrelevant.

So why the trolls? They’re coming after Older for the same reason that he’s succeeding as a writer?—?his urban fantasy novels actually look like urban America (including the ghosts) and he’s got no patience for the bros who want to keep their fantasy worlds white.

(11) DAMN BREAK. Kameron Hurley charts the history of hydraulic pressure in sf: “The Establishment Has Always Hated The New Kids”.

…Though there has been momentum building for some time, a backlash against the backlash, I’d say it wasn’t until about 2013 when publishing started to catch up. Ann Leckie wrote a space opera (a woman wrote a space opera! With women in it! AND PEOPLE BOUGHT IT SHOCKING I KNOW AS IF NO ONE HAD BOUGHT LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS OR ANYTHING BY CJ CHERRYH OR OCTAVIA BUTLER), and it swept the awards. We Need Diverse Books was able to organize the conversation about the overwhelming whiteness of publishing, bringing together disparate voices into one voice crying out for change in who writes, edits, and publishes books, while the first Muslim Ms. Marvel comic book (written by a Muslim, even!) broke sales records.

The water has been building up behind the damn for a long time, and it’s finally burst.

Watching the pushback to this new wave of writers finally breaking out from the margins to the mainstream has been especially amusing for me, as I spent my early 20’s doing a lot of old-school SF reading, including reading SFF history (I will always think of Justine Larbalestier as the author of The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction). I was, of course, especially interested in the history of feminist science fiction. Women have always written SFF, of course, but the New Wave of the 60’s and 70’s brought with it an influx of women writers of all races and men of color that was unprecedented in the field (if still small compared to the overall general population of said writers in America). This was the age of Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Sam Delany, and nutty young upstarts like Harlan Ellison. These writers brought a much needed and refreshing new perspective into the field. They raised the bar for what science fiction was. And so the writing got better. The politics and social mores being dissected got more interesting and varied, as one would expect when you introduce a great wave of writers into a field that was happy to award the same handful of folks year after year. They shook up the field. They changed science fiction forever. The established pros had to write their hearts out to catch up….

(12) KEN LIU’S OPINION OF HOGWARTS. Rachel Swirsky did a “Silly Interview with Ken Liu who HAS THE SCHEMATICS for a Time Turner!”

RS: Speaking of Harry Potter, if you could send your kids to Hogwarts, would you?

KL: I’d have to ask my kids. Personally, I’m not a big fan of sending them away to boarding school because I want to spend more time with them. Parents get so little time with their children as is… But if they really want to go and learn magic, I’ll support them. And I hope they work hard to challenge the rather authoritarian system at Hogwarts and engage in campus activism.

(13) THERE WILL BE WALRUS. Steve Davidson did a silly interview of his own — with Timothy the Talking Cat, at Amazing Stories.

ASM: What kind of cat are you (alley, purebred,,,?), or is that kind of inquiry offensive?  Do cats themselves make such distinctions?

TTTC: I’m glad you asked. Some people have claimed that I am a British Shorthair cat. However, my cousin had a DNA test and apparently my family are actually the rare French Chartreux breed. This is an important distinction and finally shows what liars those people are who have accused me of being a Francophobe, ‘anti-French’ and/or in some way prejudiced against France, the French and anything remotely Gallic. People need to understand that when I point out that France is a looming danger to all right thinking people in America and other countries as well, like maybe Scotland or Japan. I really can’t stress this enough – the French-Squirrel axis is real and it is plotting against us all. This why Britain needs to leave the European Union right now. I have zero tolerance for those who say we should wait for the referendum – that is just playing into their hands. But understand I am not anti-French as my DNA proves. Squirrels like to say ‘Timothy you are such a Francophobe’ as if that was a dialectical argument against my well thought out positions. They have no answer when I point out that I am MORE French than Charles DeGaulle. Squirrels just can’t think straight about these things. Notice that if you even try and type ‘Francophobe’ your computer will try to turn it into ‘Francophone’ – that is how deep the Franco-Squirrel conspiracy goes. Squirrel convergence happens at high levels in IT companies these days – that is how I lost my verification tick on Twitter.

I don’t talk to other cats these days. Frankly many of them are idiots….

(14) HENRY AND ERROL. The editors of Galactic Journey and File 770. Two handsome dudes – but ornery.

(15) CRITERIA. Dann collects his thoughts about “That Good Story” at Liberty At All Costs.

In a conversation I am having at File 770, I was asked to define what makes a science fiction/fantasy book “great” for me.  Rather than losing these radiant pearls of wisdom to the effluence of teh intertoobery, I thought I would cement them here in my personal record….

Stay Away From Check Boxes Whoo boy.  I can smell trouble burning at the other end of the wire already.

“Check box” fiction really undermines the quality of my reading experience.  What is “check box” fiction?  It is a story that includes elements indicating diversity in the cast of characters that has zero impact on the the story.

In a reverse of the above, I’d like to suggest N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season” as a good example of not doing “check box” fiction.  One cluster of protagonists included a character that is straight, one that is seemingly bi-sexual, and one that is decidedly homosexual.  They have a three-way.

And while the more patently descriptive passages of those events didn’t do much for me, the fact that their respective sexuality helped inform their motivations and moved the story forward made the effort in describing their sexuality worthwhile reading.  She also did a reasonable job at expressing how physical appearances differed based on regionalism.  [There were one or two other moments that could be considered “check box(es)”, but for the most part it wasn’t a factor in this book.]

IMHO, including a character that is “different” without having that difference impact the story is at the very least a waste of time that detracts from the story and at the very worst insultingly dismissive of the people that possess the same characters.

(16) IT AIN’T ME BABE. The Guardian got some clickbait from speculating about the identity of Chuck Tingle. Vox Day denies it’s him. Zoë Quinn doesn’t know who it is. The reporter, despite taking 2,000 words of interview notes, also is none the wiser.

Theories abound online: is Tingle Lemony Snicket? The South Park boys? Some sort of performance artist – perhaps the “Banksy of self-published dinosaur erotica” as someone once called him on Twitter? Last year, Jon Tingle – apparently the son of Chuck – appeared on a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread to share unsettling insights into his father: “Yes, my father is very real. He is an autistic savant, but also suffers from schizophrenia. To make it very clear, my father is one of the gentlest, sweetest people you could ever meet and is not at all dangerous, although he does have a history of SELF harm … I would not let him be the butt of some worldwide joke if I didn’t have faith that he was in on it in some way. Regardless, writing and self-publishing brings him a lot of joy.” If this is all a joke, it’s hard to know where it starts or where to laugh….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Will R., JJ, and Tom Hunter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]

328 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/19/16 I Am Not In The Scroll Of Common Men

  1. Cassy B.: A Fall of Moondust, oh, dear. Has the Suck Fairy been at it? I read it when I was ten or twelve and I loved it for the competence-porn (although I didn’t, obviously, know that term at the time). But I’ve never revisited it since….

    I only just read it last year, which was a pity; I’m sure I would have appreciated it more as a child when the predictability and the sexism would not have been apparent to me.

    I am slowly working my way backward, reading all the Hugo and Nebula nominated/winning novels and short fiction. I am sure that as I get farther back I will have this experience more and more — but I still think it’s worthwhile to read those stories anyway.

  2. JJ, in the mid-70s when I read it, casual sexism was in the air I breathed. I barely even noticed that the heroes of all the SFF stories I read (with the notable exception of Jirel of Joiry) were pretty much exclusively male, because the heroes of practically *every* story I read were male, regardless of genre. With the occasional Old Lady (per Agatha Christy). That’s just The Way Things Were. (I’m glad that that is increasingly not The Way Things Are, for the sake of my nieces….)

  3. @Aaron

    Thanks for the link. It was somewhat helpful and somewhat harmful to my perception of the book.

    As a matter of craft, it should have been possible for Ms. Leckie to include some sort of intro/prologue to get the reader up to speed on some of those aspects that were explored in the prior books. As an example, Justin Cronin’s City of Mirrors** includes a very brief history of the prior two books in his The Passage series presented in the style of a historical research paper to give the reader some context for things that will occur later in the book.

    So if those eight items are important to appreciating Ancillary Mercy, then perhaps Ms. Leckie should have included such an intro. This is a nomination for a single book rather than the series, right?

    @Hampus/Xtifir

    I really like space operas. Space operas usually do not predominantly frequently focus on drinking tea, IME. **chuckle**

    B/R to all,
    Dann

    **A 2016 book, for those looking for something worthy of consideration for next year. Thus far it is really quite good.

  4. I think one thing that make the Ancillary books feel slightly less explosive than some Space Opera si the number of violent incidents which are either hovering threats which do not materialize (Though they do not materialize specifically because of actions taken), or seem small and personal (Because in several cases characters choose the smallest possible form of violence necessary to avoid more violence.)

    Often, in space operas and other SF, the acts of violence are the protagonists protagging, having been put into a position where violence is the only way they can solve an immediate problem. When the Death Star is about to blow up your base, you kinda have to send x-wings out to get into shooting battles and blow the darn thing up.

    In the ancillary books, it seems as though most of the characters are doing everything in their power to use diplomacy and preventatitve measures to decide the fate of whole empires. Yes, Breq fires a very interesting gun to interesting effect, and ends up needing medical attention. Yes, characters die and bombs go off, and all that — but it seems as if most of Leckie’s characters take either the position that violence is reprehensible, or that it is inefficient compared to other means, and so much of the protagonists protagging and antagonists antagonizing is done by means which cut off the bigger violence before it happens. This protest might become a massacre? Who do you talk to to make sure the station security don’t overreact? Which person or persons can be taken into custody to stop others from starting a fight? What actions meant to be behind closed doors, and secrets meant to be whispered need to be aired to pull the teeth of the person with the secrets? What words over a nice cup of tea actually change the course of the future?

    ALl the action and adventure is there. All the stakes are there, personal and massive both.

  5. I really like space operas. Space operas usually do not predominantly frequently focus on drinking tea, IME.

    Of course not. The Expanse frequently focuses on drinking coffee.

  6. So if those eight items are important to appreciating Ancillary Mercy, then perhaps Ms. Leckie should have included such an intro.

    Those eight items aren’t important to appreciating Ancillary Mercy: They are issues that sit in the middle of the story. In a way, they are the story. Providing a recap of the thematic elements of the series seems to me like a fairly unprecedented thing. I don’t recall Doc Smith providing a recap in the Lensman books, or Gene Wolfe giving an intro highlighting the various symbols and thematic questions in the Urth of the New Sun series. The themes in those books, like the themes contained in Leckie’s books, are conveyed in the text itself, not in some sort of explanatory preface.

  7. @Lorcan Nagle Space operas usually do not predominantly frequently focus on drinking tea, IME.

    “Earl Grey, hot!” said Captain Picard on a regular basis!

  8. @Lenora Rose: In the ancillary books, it seems as though most of the characters are doing everything in their power to use diplomacy and preventatitve measures to decide the fate of whole empires….

    Restraining myself from quoting the whole bit so I can applaud loudly–YES!

    Excellent points–and no doubt one of the reasons I so love the books (I’m teaching the entire trilogy next fall YAYYYAYAYA).

    I hadn’t thought of it in quite this way–but you are pointing out a major narrative pattern, and also now that you’ve got me thinking this way, I can now see there is a strong thread of competence porn running through the trilogy.

  9. @Aaron: Those eight items aren’t important to appreciating Ancillary Mercy: They are issues that sit in the middle of the story. In a way, they are the story. Providing a recap of the thematic elements of the series seems to me like a fairly unprecedented thing. I don’t recall Doc Smith providing a recap in the Lensman books, or Gene Wolfe giving an intro highlighting the various symbols and thematic questions in the Urth of the New Sun series. The themes in those books, like the themes contained in Leckie’s books, are conveyed in the text itself, not in some sort of explanatory preface.

    I missed your eight issues, so backtracked to read them–excellent points throughout. Although as official english teacher type, I’d quibble a bit at your the implication that you are ONLY summarizing/describing elements of the story (not that you aren’t doing that as well, and a darn good job of it!).

    You build on those specifics with questions that are analytical questions.

    I used to have a schtick in my lit courses that I wasn’t interested in teaching them the answers to questions, but how to ask better questions which is at the heart of active reading and analysis–my students were often grumpy at me because I assigned papers rather than gave tests–don’t even get me started on the destruction of large parts of the Texas public educational system through standardized testing.

    But you’re right: these are elements or themes that are at the heart of the story–and yeah, if somebody (I’m assuming Dann?) thinks that the author should have written an explanatory note, well, heck, that went out of style ages ago (“The moral of the story is:……”). Reading. It’s not just moving your eyes over the words on the page….

  10. Robinareid on June 7, 2016 at 12:42 pm said:

    @Lorcan Nagle Space operas usually do not predominantly frequently focus on drinking tea, IME.

    “Earl Grey, hot!” said Captain Picard on a regular basis!

    I am, of course kicking myself for forgetting Picard’s favourite drink. Though TV SF seems to take coffee’s side more often. About half of Deep Space Nine’s command staff were more or less addicted to Rak’tajino, AKA Klingon coffee, and similarly there’s an episode of Voyager where Janeway sets course for a nebula they think they can use to generate power for the replicators so she can get a mug of coffee. Meanwhile on the other side, Susan Ivanova had a secret stash of coffee plants hidden in a hydroponics lab on Babylon 5, so she could harvest her own beans.

  11. I think all Dann is asking for is a ‘story-so-far’ preface, which is still quite common (for instance, Shadow Scale, which I am reading quite now, has one). It wouldn’t actually say ‘here are the major issues’; it would summarise the plot in such a way as to make them salient.

    I certainly don’t think Leckie is obliged to provide such a thing; in a fairly short series which appears quite quickly, she can reasonably assume that most of her readers have read, and remember, the previous books. Still, this may make AM less well qualified as a Hugo candidate than it would otherwise be.

  12. There is disagreement on whether a synopsis/”what has happened before” is a good thing to have at the beginning of the latest instalment of an ongoing series, or if it’s better to fold the incluing into the main text. I personally prefer the synopsis; new readers can get up to speed quickly, and regular readers can skip it. I often find that trying to inclue readers in the main text can get clunky & repetitive.

  13. Hi Lenora,

    I agree. Sort of why I put that “**chuckle**” up there.

    One of the reasons why I have enjoyed the first four books in John Scalzi’s OMW series is because there are some thinky parts where people are trying to find a way out of their predicament that doesn’t involve blowing up a planet. I enjoyed some of that in AM as well.

    The Foundation Trilogy was reasonably another large scale space opera that involved some thinky bits as well.

    Mostly, my comment was intended as a good natured jest. But there did come a time where a character walked into several different rooms only to have various crew members fall all over themselves to fetch some tea became a little Monty Python-esque. It would have been a bit less of an issue if I hadn’t recently read The Fifth Season that also had a fair amount of hot beverage consumption-as-ritual in it.

    Hi Andrew,

    Correct on all counts. Thanks very much.

    Hi Soon Lee,

    I agree that there are different methods of accomplishing the same objective. I’ve seen it done several different ways with varying degrees of success in every category.

    Regards,
    Dann

  14. @Dann: I actually thought Ancillary Mercy had a bit more tea than it needed. When the very beginning of the book had Breq waking up and getting tea, I cheered a “Let your freak flag fly, Ann Leckie!” cheer, but later on there were a couple times where it felt like a tic. It’s still the first of the three novels I gave five stars to in my Amazon review (the others each got four), but lots of tea, yeah.

    On the other hand, fewer raised eyebrows I think?

  15. @Soon Lee: “I personally prefer the synopsis; new readers can get up to speed quickly, and regular readers can skip it. I often find that trying to inclue readers in the main text can get clunky & repetitive.”

    When I was working with J.B. on how to split their first novel (155K words), we discussed that and went with a little of both. There’s a little teaser at the end of Book One and a little refresher at the beginning of Book Two*, then the first chapter of Book Two features a character who needs to be brought up to speed on some of What Has Gone Before… so there was a natural recap point and tone shift conveniently close to a minor climax that served as a convenient stopping point. The result wasn’t quite an even split – Book Two is significantly longer – but it was a natural one.

    * I think of these as the “same Bat-Time” inserts. They’re maybe a page or two each, just enough to refresh your memory, and they got discarded for the all-in-one release because they’d be utterly cheesy in that context.

  16. @Jim

    As a Wheel of Time fan, I would like to state for the record that I found the Ancillary books distinctly lacking in the crossing-arms, sniffing, braid-pulling, and spanking departments.

    Hmph.

  17. snowcrash: As a Wheel of Time fan, I would like to state for the record that I found the Ancillary books distinctly lacking in the crossing-arms, sniffing, braid-pulling, and spanking departments.

    You forgot the “sitting on laps” department.

  18. the cover of APA-L #401 from Jan 18, 1973, does, in fact, still glow slightly 43 years later.

  19. After reading the first pages of “The Aeronauts Windlass”, I was quite sure there would be an abundance of braid-pulling. But it is as with snowy taverns. You just can’t trust authors anymore.

  20. The Wherl of Time did long synopsis of what came before (I was a fan although on a partial reread I don’t understand why). What a pleasure AM didn’t spend 1/3 of the book bringing everyone up-to-date.

  21. Wow, I don’t even remember the tea in the Ancillary books. I guess the choice of beverage for characters is not something I spend a whole lot of time paying attention to. Unless it’s fairly unusual, e.g. hardboiled Archie Goodwin’s love of milk in the Nero Wolfe books. I dunno, is the “wrong” choice of beverage supposed to ruin a book for me? I really like Nero Wolfe.

    As for an intro, you know what could have used a better intro? Dune. I bounced off the first chapter of Dune several times before I was able to get past it to the good parts. I mean, it may not have been snowy taverns, but it was old aristocrats lounging around in decaying castles or something, which is just as bad. These kids, these Frank Herberts and Ann Leckies, they’re ruining SF with their fantasy elements, I tells ya! 😀

  22. Xtifr: Wow, I don’t even remember the tea in the Ancillary books.

    I remember the references to it, and that it’s one of the numerous defining characteristics of the Radch culture — I just find it bizarre that anyone would claim that it is a major part of the books, when they are taken as a whole.

  23. Wasn’t that part of the point of the tea…that here is this genteel ritual being practiced by an all-but-mechaical stone-cold soldier? Which doesn’t seem so far off, say, a samurai. The finery of the clothing might make a similar comparison.

    There’s also a poignance to those touches of who Breq might have been as a human. Of course it may lack the pathos of, say, the tears of a sentient tank.

    “Tea in space” just shows how little grounds for actual criticism they could come up with, and the more it continues, the more I have to think Breq is exactly the hero we need and deserve.

  24. “Tea in space” just shows how little grounds for actual criticism

    In fairness, when you start asking “is it even possible to question the very idea of empire through what is essentially a Horatio Hornblower story” it gets harder to fit into your Tweet.

  25. Everything is basically a Horatio Hornblower story when you get right down to it. “Story” is a cliche since, oh, forever.

  26. One of the counterintuitive elements of those books was how they didn’t simply condemn empire as a model. Breq sees how little the nominal forms of things matter.

    Besides which, how is Horatio not nutty nuggets, anyway? There’s no winning.

  27. What I loved about Breq is that she doesn’t care whether you’re a pauper or a king, only whether you’ve screwed her over.

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