(1) CLICHE KILLER. Charlie Stross has left the story! Or at least heaved the book across the room. He’s posted a rant about “Science-fictional shibboteths” with examples of “what makes me yell when I kick the tires on an SF/F novel these days.”
…Disbelief can be shattered easily by authorial mistakes—one of the commonest is to have a protagonist positioned as a sympathetic viewpoint character for the reader behave in a manner that is not only unsympathetic but inconsistent with the protagonist’s parameters. But there are plenty of other ways to do it….
But then we get to more specific matters: specific shibboleths of the science fictional or fantastic literary toolbox that give my book-holding hand that impossible-to-ignore twitch reflex.
(Caveat: I am talking about books here. I basically don’t do TV or film because my attention span is shot, my eyeballs can’t scan fast enough to keep up with jerkycam or pull in enough light to resolve twilight scenes, and my hand/eye coordination is too crap for computer games.)
Asteroidal gravel banging against the hull of a spaceship. Alternatively: spaceships shelting from detection behi nd an asteroid, or dodging asteroids, or pretty much anything else involving asteroids that don’t look like this….
(2) SILVER BELLS. A Krampus parade in Austria. The video (a public Facebook post) is highly entertaining. Jim Rittenhouse nicknamed the marchers “the 324th Krampus Brigade” but it’s a genuine local custom. (Well, I’m not sure about the giant silver bells on their buttcheeks….)
What is this…? An Austrian tradition!
The Krampus is an old tradition. It has its origins before Catholicism reached the mountains in Austria and Bavaria. In the past, were the winter was cold and strong, before the Krampus a so called Perchte should punch the winter away with a rod. When Catholicism reached the described areas, the Perchte was transformed into the Krampus, just like other profane rites. So the Krampus got the bad part of the Nikolaus-Krampus team. With the Krampus scaring the kids. The good kids are rewarded by the Nicklaus whereas the bad kids are punished by the Krampus.
The Parade called “Krampuslauf” serves to present the masks . Many hundreds or thousands of people look at this ” Krampuslauf ” in different locations in Austria.
(3) Today In History
- December 5, 1974: The last new episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was broadcast on the BBC.
- December 5, 1980: Big-screen adaptation of the Flash Gordon serial opens in the U.S.
(4) Today’s Birthday Boys
- Born December 5, 1890: Fritz Lang
- Born December 5, 1901: Walt Disney
(5) MYTHIC FIGURES. Seen in Paris a couple of weeks ago —
(6) SORCERER TO THE CROWN. The Independent profiles author Zen Cho.
Perhaps somewhat unwittingly, Zen Cho has become something of a poster-girl for the growing chorus of voices clamouring for more diversity in science fiction and fantasy literature.
It seems a given that a genre that deals with the different, the new, and the unfamiliar as a matter of course should quite naturally embrace diversity and progressiveness in both its practitioners and its characters.
But the recent debacle over the genre’s Hugo Awards – to cut a very long story very short, the awards nominations were flooded by a concerted campaign from a couple of fandom factions who think SF should really be the preserve of straight white males, and a spaceship should be a spaceship and not a metaphor for anything else – shows that there are still clearly-delineated battle lines over this….
Zen Cho’s response has been more measured, and delivered in really the best way an author can – she’s written a novel that simultaneously manages to tackle questions of race, gender, and social justice while being a thumping good read.
Sorcerer to the Crown is a Regency fantasy that posits an alternative-history England where magic is practised openly, but where political shenanigans within the source of the magic, the Fairy Court, are limiting England’s power … and just when it needs it most as the Government ramps up its war with the French.
(7) AN UNEXPECTED LANCELOT. Sherwood Smith covers the history, then reviews the mystery, in “Arthurian Cycle with a New Twist” at Book View Café.
But after a lifetime of sampling all these various versions, I’ve never really taken to this storyline. It’s a doom and disaster tale that turns on adultery. Not my cuppa.
I did have to teach Malory back in my teaching days, getting puzzled kids through fifteenth century English mainly by teasing out stories that could relate to their lives now, and then painting a picture of life then. We read it in spite of the story, kind of, because personality was pretty sparse: the characters are all pretty much one thing, especially the women.
But there’s one Arthurian story I really like a whole lot, and that’s this one, by Carol Anne Douglas, the first half of which is entitled Lancelot: Her Story. I’ve been reading drafts over a number of years, as she slowly reworked and layered the story into what it is now.
She’s studied those earlier versions, and it shows in the episodic nature of the narrative, the easily accessible prose, and of course the famous people and incidents. But she added a twist: Lancelot is a woman. And Arthur and his Knights don’t know it.
(8) TOP 10 WARS. From Future War Stories, “FWS: Top Ten Most Interesting Wars of Military Science Fiction” Many good picks, and plenty of fodder for discussion since my own list wouldn’t overlap that much. What about yours?
- The Cylon Wars from BSG
The Cylon Wars have been a founding event in both BSG series, and neither have been seen in any length until the 2012 web-only miniseries Blood & Chrome. In the 2004-2009 Reimagined Series, the rebellion of the intelligence machines, known as Cylons, was about fifty two years before the Cylon Holocaust (BCH), and lasted for 12 years. This war united the 12 Colonies of Kobol under the Articles of Colonization, and saw the construction of the Battlestars that we know and love. This conflict transformed the 12 Colonies and paved the way for its destruction decades later and the rise of our society here on Earth. But, we saw very little of the actually, despite the Caprica series.
In the original 1978 series, the Cylons were actually an reptilian alien race that used robotic soldiers to wages their wars after their own population was nearly exhausted to maintain their empire.
The Cylons of the original series waged an 1,000 year war with the 12 Colonies of Man, until finally achieving victory, and destroying the 12 Colonies of Man. Of course, both Cylons had help in destroying the 12 Colonies in the form of the Baltar characters. After the end of the SyFy Channel reimagined series in 2009, it was believed that a new series would be created around the Cylon War and William Adama’s experiences in the war, along with the series Caprica. Again, the Galactica would be front-and-center. This would have allowed us to see the war that had been floating around science fiction since the 1970’s. That promised series was not delivered in the form that we fans expected. BSG: Blood & Chrome was downgraded to an online miniseries of a 10 episodes. The show we thought we were going to get was just okay, and the Cylon Wars remains an unseen war. What is interesting about the Cylon War mentioned in both series, is that creators took two very different ideas on the war and the Cylons.
(9) VIRTUAL CHERNOBYL. Preview the virtual tour of Chernobyl now being assembled for an April online debut.
Take a virtual tour of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster zone – without leaving your sofa
The town of Prypiat is not a place which is likely to feature on many travel-lovers’ bucket lists.
Almost three decades ago, its 350,000 residents’ lives changed forever when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster turned their home into a terrifying radioactive danger zone.
Prypiat might not be the sort of destination you’d fancy visiting in real life, but soon you will have the chance to take an amazing virtual tour of this abandoned Soviet ghost city.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster next year, a Polish games developer called The Farm 51 is offering “anyone with access to virtual reality devices an unprecedented trip to the area without leaving the comfort of their homes”.
… “Virtual visitors will be free to explore and engage with places that have hitherto been off limits.”
The Farm 51 spent days filming the town’s eerie locations in unprecedented detail, digitising its spooky swimming pool, ferris wheel and bumper cars.
Anyone brave enough to take a virtual tour can do so starting from April 26 next year – the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.
(10) GOOGLE BESTSELLERS. At The Digital Reader, “Google Play Reveals Its Best-Selling eBooks, Videos, and Games for 2015”. Depressingly, five of the 10 top books are “Fifty Shades…” of something. But The Martian by Andy Weir and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs also sneaked in there.
After seeing Google’s list, I was better prepared to discover that science fiction is only the seventh among the top selling fiction categories at Smashwords — “2015 Smashwords Survey Reveals Insights to Help Authors Reach More Readers”.
[Last three of ten points.]
- Avoid $1.99. For the fourth year in a row, $1.99 was a black hole in terms of overall earnings. On a unit sales basis, although $1.99 books outperformed all books priced $5.00 and above, it dramatically underperformed on overall earnings, earning 73% less than the average of all other price points. If you write full length fiction and you have books priced at $1.99, trying increasing the price to $2.99 or $3.99, and if your book performs as the aggregate does, you’ll probably sell more units. Or if it’s short and $2.99+ is too high, try 99 cents instead because the data suggests you’ll earn more and reach about 65% more readers. I’m not entirely certain why this is the case. It’s not because our retailers pay lower levels for sub-$2.99 books. They don’t. Our retailers pay the same for $1.99 as they do for $9.99. There’s something about the price point that readers don’t like. Who knows, maybe readers see 99 cents as an enticing promotional price, $2.99 and up as a fair price, and $1.99 as the price for lesser quality books that couldn’t make the $2.99 grade. Your theory is as good as mine.
- Bestselling authors and social media. Bestselling authors are more likely to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and more likely to have a blog. Not a huge surprise, though it’s worth noting there are plenty of successful authors who have minimal presence on social media.
- Top 10 Fiction categories during the one year period: 1. Romance. 2. Erotica. 3. YA and teen fiction. 4. Fantasy. 5. Mystery & detective. 6. Gay and lesbian fiction. 7. Science fiction. 8. Historical. 9. Thriller & suspense. 10. Adventure.
[Thanks to Mark-kitteh, Alan Baumler, Will R., John King Tarpinian, and Brian Z. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus .]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Borscht!
(For Chernobyl.)
10) I didn’t like Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I thought the pictures came in the way of the story, caused a break in the reading flow. Also, got irritated about the plot line. Not my thing.
Watching a news report about Americans playing cricket.
Beware. http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Krikkit
For those who want to learn more about cricket please go: here
{Laughs evilly after sending the unaware to TVTropes}
A Sunday fifth?
9)
Celebrate?! I don’t think that word means what you think it does.
Commemorate seems a better word.
And just finished watching Doctor Who season finale…
Re: Top 10 Wars
It’s worth noting that this headline is misleading. From the beginning of the article:
(Emphasis – but not Enemy – mine.) So it’s not a “top ten ever” – more of a hipster list of the ten best obscure conflicts.
How did my fellow 770’s like Sorcerer to the Crown?
I loved the social dynamics, particularly the thorough oppression of women and servants’ magic – Prunella’s school was terrific. But I found the book slight and unsatisfying in practically every other regard.
If anybody’s interested in discussing the book, I’m game 🙂
@Standback, re: Sorcerer to the Crown
I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can entirely see where you are coming from with “slight” though – it’s quick, breezily written, and best simply inhaled. I think that when you combine thorough-going fun with elements to ponder over later, you’ve got a very nice mix. We may well be looking at the same elements and simply enjoying them differently. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for regency fantasies, so there’s that.
If I was going to be critical, I think there were points where Zacharias simply being more forthcoming with people would have solved plot points, and there were times when he and Prunella weren’t quite in the same book.
A good end to a pretty strong season, I thought.
Old man zombie,
That old man zombie,
He don’t say nothing
But won’t stop moving —
He just keeps shambling
He just keeps shambling along.
It might be fungal,
It might be viral,
We might be trapped in
A downward spiral,
But old man zombie
He just keeps shambling along.
You and me, we sweat and swear,
Body all aching and racked with fear,
Bar that door!
Hide that pit!
I wandered off alone
And I just got bit.
I’m infected
Your brain I’m eyeing,
I’m scared of living
And tired of dying,
I’m old man zombie
And just keep shambling along!
BRAVO!
@Mark:
Heh; I like that observation 🙂
There were just a whole lot of elements that didn’t seem to make much sense – particularly, things that were described as incredibly important, and yet absolutely insignificant in terms of actual behavior and effect.
(SPOILERS)
.
.
.
For example, they’ve got this huge honking fairy kingdom they’re apparently bordering on. And it’s super mysterious and everybody’s really interested in it and it’s the source of all power and no Englishman has been there for half a century.
…and then we find out that Zacharias can just go in and out whenever he pleases. Except he, and no other Sorcerer Royal, has actually bothered to do so. Because…? That kind of takes all the air out of the mystery – it’s so irrelevant that nobody can even be bothered to check in on it.
.
.
.
(/SPOILERS)
That’s the one that bothered me most, but there were quite a few of them. I was consistently let down every time a vaunted mystery was unveiled; the answers never matched up with the significance that was ascribed to them earlier. (Zacharias’s “complaint” was another, particularly the oft-repeated claim that it had something to do with why magic was “beyond the physical capabilities of a female.”)
The other thing I really disliked about the book was that the entire English society seemed composed only of idiots and dandies. One protagonist is trying desperately to save English society; the other is trying desperately to join its upper echelons, and I’m mostly there scratching my head going “but why? All those people sound horrible.”
I actually feel a lot better reading Cho describing it as “post-colonial fluff for book nerds” in the Independent article, because that’s kind of how it reads to me. It’s light, it’s fun, the protagonists are fun characters, there are some scenes which are silly and fun. As light entertainment whose chosen playground is societal oppression and post-colonialism, I can see the attraction. I just feel like I probably wouldn’t have read it if I’d understood that – I wouldn’t have expected it to be my cup of tea. Pretty much any light-entertainment tends to annoy me in the same way SttC did, and those themes don’t appeal to me specifically for light entertainment, particularly absent other draw factors.
@Mark: What kind of elements did you feel you got to ponder over later?
As I said, I liked the school for Gentlewitches. And the other twisty intriguing thing was Zacharias’s relationship with his adoptive parents, which is messy and painful (I quite liked the Strange Horizons review of the book, which gave a lot of focus to this relationship).
My favourite Arthurian books are Kevin Crossley-Holland’s YA Arthur Trilogy, about a young boy growing up in a medieval settlement. It’s about daily and family life and the passing of the seasons and the doings of the locality. Beautifully done, but the only magic is the gift given to the boy, named Arthur, by Merlin, which allows him to see the story of King Arthur and the Round Table. The final volume sees young Arthur departing on the Fourth Crusade, and the Arthurian myth becomes an expression of the difficulties of growing into maturity and coping with the awfulness of the world. There’s also a truly wonderful sort-of-sequel following one of the characters on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, called Gatty’s Tale. Can’t recommend these books highly enough.
(6) SORCEROR TO THE CROWN
The Penguin/Random House page for Sorceror to the Crown tells me I “might also like” Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks.
No.
No. I really wouldn’t.
In other news, Bernie Sanders’ campaign tells me I “might also like” Ted Cruz and the waiter at Eleven Madison Park tells me I “might also like” a Burger King Whopper.
@Standback
I think you’ve answered your own question – you say you don’t appreciate most light entertainment, and SttC is both light and entertaining.
Specific elements – there was some real nastiness behind the school for Gentlewitches that I thought was a very revealing analogy for the period. The treatment of colonial relations, just with magic in the mix, was absolutely spot-on for the era – a lot of writers don’t show how precarious the British hold on the Empire was. Zacharias’ relationships are another obvious one – how far should he be grateful to people who’ve treated him better than others would have, but not that well in an absolute sense?
@Peace
Errrrr…..I have concerns for their recommendation algorithms.
Amazon UK tells me that I should also look at The House of Shattered Wings, Sorceror of the Wildeeps, Fifth Season….and
Yes, that is its full title. I’m guessing the quad “/M” is because there’s a whole pack of them?!?
Arglblarglgrrrrrarrrrrrrrrrrgh!
(pant, pant)
My DVR cut out before the show ended.
Graaaaaaaaaagh!
@Peace
Oh noes!
It’s on iplayer, but probably not for outside the UK.
I seem to suspend disbelief a lot easier than Charlie Stross.
The sfnal shibboleth that bothers me the most is wormholes, used to replace hyperspace in older sf as a method of quick interstellar travel. Especially in tv and movies, it’s used as if it were like the London Underground: you go in this station here and come out a few minutes later at that one there, with no idea of where you were in between. It’s a time-saver shuttle with no interference with anybody who happens to be going in the other direction.
That’s fine as a story device; my annoyance comes from the fact that, unlike hyperspace which is pure handwaving, wormholes claim actual theoretical scientific plausibility. But used as a shuttle, it’s no more believable. An actual wormhole wouldn’t be that much faster than light, if at all, as it would take hundreds of years in exterior time to be absorbed by the black hole and who knows how much longer to come out, and who knows where that would be. Not to mention that you’d be pulverized into individual subatomic particles in the process.
I don’t mind making things up. It’s pretending that there’s something real about it when there isn’t that annoys me.
@Mark:
Yes, that’s exactly what I was keying onto as well at the School for Gentlewitches! This very polite, very proper, very cheerful way of suffocating people to death. Except of course when them doing a little magic is, you know, convenient for the landlady. And juxtaposed so clearly against how much England needs its magicians – it’s a bunch of horrible hypocrites shooting themselves in the foot. I thought that part was absolutely fantastic 🙂
So I feel like the book raised the issue, but then didn’t deal with it very much. It mentions occasionally how uneasy Z is with it, but he’s also completely loyal to England (more than most of the English we meet), and he sacrifices himself horrifically for his adoptive father. I feel like any tension here is told-not-shown.
(Also entirely absent is any actual examination of what the Wythes might have been capable of, in terms of treating Z well and fighting oppression. There’s an accusation of having wronged Z in many ways while trying to be kind to him, but there’s no sense of what possible behavior would have been better.)
@Nigel:
This, a million times over. It’s one of the few series I have in both hardback and paperback because I found myself lending out the paperbacks so often. In particular, the section of the third book dealing with the Crusades is brilliant. But the different perspective on King Arthur is refreshing – all the stories are there but not quite as you remember them.
Also, for an unusual take on the Arthurian mythos, I will recommend The Pendragon Protocol by Philip Purser-Hallard, although it’s one of those books that you really need to know nothing about beforehand in order to appreciate properly. And the title of the sequel somewhat spoils the effect too, which is a shame.
@camestros
Several years running, Paul Cornell has come to Convergence in Minneapolis and, among the other programming he’s on, does a “Cricket for Americans” bit out in the parking lot, where he teaches us poor Colonials the game. Its a lot of fun to watch and I’ve walked away just about grokking the game…
Thank you, you’re very kind, but you are correct. It is unavailable outside the UK.
Oh, BBC America, why must you fail us so consistently?
Argh, I’m a month behind on my Doctor-watching; I must catch up before I catch any spoilers. (Any more spoilers, that is. Some helpful soul already posted some GIFs from last night’s episode on my tumblr dash that I glimpsed before I managed to cover my eyes with my arm and run shrieking from the room.)
The only time I ever came close to understanding cricket was after watching Lagaan, the 3 hour subtitled Bollywood musical about a cricket game between some Indian villagers and the local British.
Cough, cough, cough.
This time of year is not good for my asthma. Even in 9835, we still have asthma and its issues with cold, dry air because it’s just not exciting enough to attract researchers and research credits.
(Checks. Yes, I do appear to be whining.)
Clicky.
Cricket is a very simple game. You bowl the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes there’s an interminable rain delay and you have to use the Duckworth-Lewis method.
Though I’m no fan of either, I find cricket easier to understand than baseball. Baseball, as far as I can tell, is like focusing on the negative space of cricket. Instead of being about the batting and the runs, it’s the pitching/bowling and the misses.
The internet is failing to find the original for me, but the official explanation of cricket is along the lines of:
I was convinced it was a Michael Palin sketch to allow a serendipitous connection to (3), but my google-fu is lacking. All I can find is many slightly different unattributed versions.
Mark-kitteh –
I had that on a linen tea towel once.
(3) I saw the newly released Flash Gordon in a movie theater in Pittsburgh where the heat had gone out. Only a friend and I were brave enough to huddle in the cold to watch it. It seemed minor at the time, but seems to have grown in stature over the years. Maybe the Queen soundtrack helped. Or was it Brian Blessed?
In the year 2895, we’re facing the Goaterdämmerung, twilight of the goats.
Aw man, the last I saw on “Doctor Who” gur Qbpgbe unq pbzcyrgryl sbetbggra Pynen, fur vf urefrys pubxvat hc naq vg’f vagrafryl zrynapubyl.
Jung n ubjyvat qbjare bs n jnl gb raq!
I am so desperately sad and disappointed … And furious with the BBC’s stupid scheduling!
I’m willing to accept wormholes by themselves as interstellar shortcuts – my main problem with SF with wormhole-based travel is that it tends to handwave away the travel time outside of the wormhole. Wormholes are typically described as being located in a solar system – and then apparently all planets in that solar system can be reached with at most a few days of sub-lightspeed coasting from the wormhole exit.
A related trope is that on coming out of the wormhole you do a quick scan and map out everything that’s going on in the solar system. And in some cases the travellers can even look out the spaceship window and see the whole solar system. “A little to the left of our ship is the planet with rings, and to the right is a large gas planet.” Nope. Space doesn’t work that way.
(I liked the story in “A long way to a small angry planet”, but it was big on these kind of errors.)
***
Regarding Arthurian myths, this might interest some:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/23/glastonbury-myths-made-up-by-12th-century-monks?_ga=1.183381025.604852481.1449402872
It’s a debunking of the connection between Arthur and Glastonbury. The most interesting part is that the researchers claim to have identified an economic crisis after a fire in 1184 as the reason the myths where made up.
Sorcerer To The Crown – I enjoyed it as a nice bit of light entertainment that I really needed after reading some dreary dreck. It isn’t perfect, but it was the kind of book I needed at that moment. I like to mix it up between the heavy stuff and lighter fare, though.
Kricket, baseball and american football are all total lunacy with rules made by bureaucratic madmen. Soccer would be understandable if it wasn’t for that weird offside rule.
Johan P: Yes, that’s also a problem with wormholes as a method of travel, and it also bothers me. (It destroys a lot of the premise for the movie Interstellar.) But it’s just as applicable to hyperspace travel.
As I said, I don’t mind ftl as a story device, though it’s plainly impossible by our current knowledge of physics. What bothers me is the replacement of the traditional handwaving by something that claims a veneer of updated scientific plausibility when it’s no such thing. I begin to wish I were an author of space fiction just so that I could drop the wormholes and go back to hyperspace.
This thread is useful. I have long recognized that Cricket is the Commonwealth’s equivalent of a 4chan prank, and anyone who claims they can explain the game or that they understand it is trolling, and a bad person. I have updated my list accordingly. Thank you!
😉
@Hampus – Couldn’t do Miss Peregrine’s either. I went in expecting creepy children, and got X-men Academy with an appallingly whiny protagonist. (Mind you, “I’m super rich and I just don’t know what I waaaaaant…” is about as appealing to me as creamed Cajun herring.)
@K8
I had the opposite reaction. I read Sorcerer to the Crown after (if I remember correctly) Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and The Fifth Season and really thought it was bland and unsatisfying compared to those, and to Zen Cho’s own shorter works. I had read her collection several months earlier and was really hoping to be blown away.
I agree with @standback, the story kept promising more than it delivered.
It probably didn’t help that I had reread Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell within recent memory, which deals with a lot of the same themes, in a similar time period, with a lot more texture and depth. Sorcerer to the Crown did not strike me as being in dialog with JS&MN to any noticeable extent, which would have been interesting. It was more of a variation on a theme.
@Hampus
Kricket, baseball and american football are all total lunacy with rules made by bureaucratic madmen.
Basically true. Football (that is, the game frequently mispronounced as soccer) evolved as a tamed-down version of various original games. The medieval English rural version was essentially:
Get the population of two rival villages in a field equidistant between the two. Hand them a ball-shaped object and run like hell. An unholy scrum then forms in which the only rule is to get the ball to a marker in your village by any means necessary.
Then there is the Orkney Ba’ game, played in the streets of Kirkwall, where the goals are the site of the (no longer present) town gates, and the sea. Played around Christmas and New Year’s Day.
It doesn’t seem to have any limitation on handling or throwing the ball.
(1),
I think it comes dangerously close to the “the only non-cliched space fiction is that which I wrote. And please ignore the Eschaton books.”
And I’m saying this as someone who likes and demands a high level of detail, actual physics, and space colonies that makes some freaking sense. Space is huge, and harsh. It helps a story if it’s as huge and harsh in the prose. And I get the frustration with mil Sci-fi he discusses. But I’m not quite sure on deeming any improvements in life-support, biology, or engineering within the laws of physics as automatically cliched space magic.
Also, for another cliche, how about ultra-libertarian or even anarcho-capitialist future societies that operate just the way early 21st century white people imagine them to operate, with no unintended consequences or harsh effects or systemic inequalities or injustices? Or how good life support might be a cliche – but the Singularity sure as heck ain’t.
From his novels, I doubt Stross will be addressing those two cliches anytime soon.
(7) AN UNEXPECTED LANCELOT
Ok, that was a “buy so fast your head spins”. It’ll be interesting to see how Douglas’s Lancelot is in conversation with the medieval genre of “gender disguised woman becomes a knight”. (Of which there are quite a number, lest anyone think the motif is some sort of modern revisionism.)
RW:
I had much the same reaction, except I didn’t care so much about the whiny protagonist. It was just, “This isn’t eerie at all, this is just the fucking X-Men again in different clothes.” I loved the packaging of the book but was disappointed at having it turn out to be just another familiar superhero fight that I never bothered with the sequel.
I want to read the books those covers belong on.
K8:
Same here part 2. I liked it, but thought it was pleasantly-constructed near-YA fluff. The big comedy battle at the end was fun; the fact that it was comedy underscored the slightness of the rest of it. But if there’s a sequel I’ll probably read it.
> “I loved the packaging of the book but was disappointed at having it turn out to be just another familiar superhero fight that I never bothered with the sequel.”
Had the exact same reaction.
I have watched cricket being played on the grounds of Trinity College during lunch breaks when I worked at a nearby bookshop. I always came away with the feeling that if I ever got to a point where I understood what was going on, the universe would conclude.