(1) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED AN ARCHITECT. The structure replacing Ray Bradbury’s torn-down home is nearly finished. LA Observed interviewed architect Thom Mayne and his wife about the design in “What would Ray think? Thom and Blythe Mayne’s house in Cheviot Hills is almost ready to call home “. Despite the title, it didn’t seem to me the question was really addressed.
Prominent LA architect Thom Mayne razed the longtime Cheviot Hills home and work space of Ray Bradbury to build his own home. Mayne promised the neighborhood and fans a “very, very modest” house that would honor Bradbury in its design. Now that the teardown-and-replace is nearly complete, KCRW’s Frances Anderton, host of Design & Architecture, gets a tour and assesses if the promise was met.
However, the promised fence with Bradbury quotes is there, although you really can’t make them out in this photo from LA Observed.
A metal screen, fabricated by Tom Farage, contains quotes from Ray Bradbury’s writings. The moving gate will eventually have a hedge that moves with it (photo: Frances Anderton.)
(2) THAT TIME GRUMPY AND DOC WENT TO THE MOVIES. Atlas Obscura unearthed “The Movie Date That Solidified J.R.R. Tolkien’s Dislike of Walt Disney”.
…According to an account in the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Tolkien didn’t go see Snow White until some time after its 1938 U.K. release, when he attended the animated film with [C.S.] Lewis. Lewis had previously seen the film with his brother, and definitely had some opinions. In a 1939 letter to his friend A.K. Hamilton, Lewis wrote of Snow White (and Disney himself):
Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated–or even brought up in a decent society?
… Tolkien didn’t like the goofball dwarfs either. The Tolkien Companion notes that he found Snow White lovely, but otherwise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross simplification of a concept they held as precious….
(3) DEMENTOR INVENTOR. Zata Rana, in an article on Quartz, “How JK Rowling Overcame Depression and Went On To Sell Over 400 Million Books”, reminds us that Rowling began to write Harry Potter novels after being diagnosed with clinical depression in the 1990s and her struggles to overcome her depression provides inspiring lessons for us all.
…During this period, her depression took a dark turn, and she considered herself a failure. She had fallen and felt stuck. She even contemplated suicide. Luckily, she found it in her to seek help, and writing became an outlet. The idea for the Harry Potter series had come to her years before on a train ride from Manchester to London. She had worked on a few chapters in Portugal, but she only really found her momentum back in the UK.
Rowling finished the first two books while still on welfare benefits. The dementors introduced in the third book were inspired by her mental illness….
(4) STINKS IN SPACE. The popular video game took a wrong turn when it left the Earth: “Activision admits taking ‘Call of Duty’ to space was a bad idea”.
Right from the very start it was clear that Activision’s Call of Duty franchise had taken a bit of a wrong turn with Infinite Warfare. The initial trailer for the game was absolutely slaughtered on YouTube, and early sales indicated that the game just wasn’t striking a chord with some of its target audience. Now, Activision is admitting what we all knew: Infinite Warfare was a misstep.
In a recent earnings call with investors, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and COO Thomas Tippl revealed that the company wasn’t particularly pleased with how the game sold, or its overall reception….
(5) CAN’T PULL OVER TO THE ROADSIDE. And you know what else is going to stink in space? Blue Origin — “Hold on tight and hold it: Jeff Bezos says no potty breaks on Blue Origin space trips”. Here are a couple quotes from a Bezos Q&A session.
What if I get queasy? Getting sick to your stomach can be a problem on zero-G airplane flights like NASA’s “Vomit Comet,” but motion sickness typically doesn’t come up until you’ve gone through several rounds of zero-G. Blue Origin’s suborbital space ride lasts only 11 minutes, with a single four-minute dose of weightlessness. “You’re going to be fine,” Bezos said.
What if I have to use the bathroom in flight? Go before you go. “Listen, if you have to pee in 11 minutes, you got problems,” Bezos said. You may have to hold it for more than 11 minutes, though, since passengers will board the spaceship a half-hour before launch.
(6) TODAY’S TRIVIA. “What, Me Worry?” Alfred E. Neuman made his debut as Mad Magazine’s mascot by appearing on the cover of The Mad Reader, a reprint paperback published in November 1954. He appeared for the first time on the magazine’s cover in issue #21 (March 1955).
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- April 26, 1956 — The Creature Walks Among Us was released.
(8) THEY STOPPED FOR LUNCH. And didn’t clean up after. Better hope your litter doesn’t last this long. “Neanderthals in California? Maybe so, provocative study says”
A startling new report asserts that the first known Americans arrived much, much earlier than scientists thought — more than 100,000 years ago __ and maybe they were Neanderthals.
If true, the finding would far surpass the widely accepted date of about 15,000 years ago.
Researchers say a site in Southern California shows evidence of humanlike behavior from about 130,000 years ago, when bones and teeth of an elephantlike mastodon were evidently smashed with rocks.
The earlier date means the bone-smashers were not necessarily members of our own species, Homo sapiens. The researchers speculate that these early Californians could have instead been species known only from fossils in Europe, Africa and Asia: Neanderthals, a little-known group called Denisovans, or another human forerunner named Homo erectus.
This reminds me of my visit 40 years ago to the Calico Early Man Site where Louis (but not Mary) Leakey thought they had found evidence of equally ancient toolmaking. According to Mary, their disagreement over this contributed to their split.
(9) QUESTIONS BIGGER THAN THE EXPANSE. The Space Review ponders the utopian and quasi-religious aspects of space advocacy in “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids”.
A few years ago historian Roger Launius wrote “Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion” in the journal Astropolitics. He noted the similarities between human spaceflight enthusiasts and what we understand as traditional religion. For much of the history of the space age the comparisons have often been blatant, with spaceflight leaders such as Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, as well as numerous political leaders such as Ronald Reagan, talking about spaceflight in quasi, or even literally religious terms. Launius observed that human spaceflight, like religion, has its immortality myths, its revered leaders and condemned villains, its sacred texts, and its rituals, rules, and shared experiences. According to Launius, “The belief system has its saints, martyrs, and demons; sacred spaces of pilgrimage and reverence; theology and creed; worship and rituals; sacred texts; and a message of salvation for humanity, as it ensures its future through expansion of civilization to other celestial bodies.”
These religious aspects can be found throughout the writings of spaceflight advocates, the self-styled missionaries of the spaceflight religion. One of the most common arguments for space settlement is to achieve immortality for humankind by moving a portion of humanity to Mars in event of catastrophe. The Space Review regularly publishes these kinds of appeals to transcendence. The advocates argue that humankind could be wiped out by natural disaster—typically a meteor strike—and settling the Moon and Mars would help avoid the species being wiped out (see “Settling space is the only sustainable reason for humans to be in space”, The Space Review, February 1, 2016). Other commonly-cited threats include man-made ones like war and environmental destruction—as if space settlers would not also face the same things in a far more fragile biosphere. The Expanse has highlighted this vulnerability and interdependence with a subplot about food production on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede collapsing because the ecosystem lacks the robustness of Earth’s complex environment.
(10) CHU ON WRITING. In an interview at Outer Places, “Author John Chu Talks Cybernetics, Short Fiction, and Sci-Fi”.
OP: Are there themes or elements you find yourself returning to again and again in your work?
Chu: At a LonCon 3 panel, I joked that all the parents in my stories make unreasonable expectations of their children. That may be truer than I’d like. Certainly, I like to explore the notion of family in its many forms, i.e., family does not have to mean blood relation. The most interesting characters in my stories are likely either navigating relationships with their blood relatives, searching for their family, or both.
(11) PLUS ATWOOD’S CAMEO. An NPR reviewer finds “Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Is Compelling — And Chilling”.
One searing scene features Offred’s memory of Aunt Lydia, the abusive headmistress who trains new Handmaids, quoting scripture and shocking the women with cattle prods. Eventually, she explains their duties as breeders. “You girls will serve the leaders of the faithful and their barren wives,” says Aunt Lydia, who cites Tinder as one source of the moral turpitude that has caused God to create the infertility crisis. “You will bear children for them. Oh! You are so lucky!”
(Atwood, who also served as a consulting producer on Hulu’s series, pops up in one scene from the first episode, where she slaps Offred for being slow to respond during an indoctrination session.)
This is a world of 1984-style paranoia and doublespeak. On the surface, it’s a placid, polite community that just happens to have black-clad guards with machine guns on every corner. But beneath that veneer is a world of grim desperation, fear and oppression. Women are stripped of husbands, children, jobs, their own money and control over their sexuality.
(12) MARVELS AND MARTYRS. Carmen Maria Machado reviews The Book of Joan for NPR.
One of the pleasures of The Book of Joan is its take-no-prisoners disregard for genre boundaries. Its searing fusion of literary fiction and reimagined history and science-fiction thriller and eco-fantasy make it a kind of sister text to Jeff VanderMeer’s ineffable Southern Reach trilogy. Yuknavitch is a bold and ecstatic writer, wallowing in sex and filth and decay and violence and nature and love with equal relish. Fans of her previous novel, The Small Backs of Children, will recognize these themes and their treatment.
(13) HELL’S JINGLING BELLS. And the BBC tells us why Milton should be more widely read.
…Ricks notes that Paradise Lost is “a fierce argument about God’s justice” and that Milton’s God has been deemed inflexible and cruel. By contrast, Satan has a dark charisma (“he pleased the ear”) and a revolutionary demand for self-determination. His speech is peppered with the language of democratic governance (“free choice”, “full consent”, “the popular vote”) – and he famously declares, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven”. Satan rejects God’s “splendid vassalage”, seeking to live:
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile Pomp.
(14) SOME LIKE THE LIGHTNING — SOME DON’T. Two perspectives on Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning.
TRIGGER WARNINGS for discussion of ciscentricity, allocentricity, intersexis, and gender essentialism, and for quoted anti-trans and anti-intersex slurs apply to the following essay, as well as SPOILER WARNINGS.
Too Like the Lightning has been feted and critically acclaimed, and now nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. I read it back when it first came out, after hearing about how well it supposedly handled queerness, and especially gender in the context of queerness, from a number of people whose opinions on the topic I usually respect; I did not agree with these assessments. I’ve been asked a number of times to discuss more fully my issues with the presentation of gender in the novel, so, with the Hugo Awards now open for voting, it seems like this might be the moment, to let voters see what this particular genderqueer person thought of the presentation of gender in the book. For context, I’m a bisexual nonbinary person and my pronoun is they….
- Yoon Ha Lee: “The problem with problematic”
Hi! I’m trans. I’m queer. I would like to talk about trans characters who end up dead in the course of story, or queer characters who are not the heroes of the story, and why that is frequently completely all right with me; and why the frequent labeling of works as “problematic” for not portraying trans (etc.) characters as paragons of virtue is itself a problem….
Now, I can completely sympathize with someone, especially a trans or nonbinary someone, noping out of Palmer’s novel due to the use of pronouns. I am personally of the opinion that you can refuse to leisure-read a book for any reason you damn well please, and I can see why that would hit a sore spot. (To reiterate: we’re talking about leisure reading here, things you read of your own will.) But I do not agree that Palmer’s worldbuilding here was problematic, and I do not think she should have been discouraged from writing this future….
“But is it hurtful?” you ask.
I feel this is the wrong question.
Individuals are hurt by whatever hurts them. And that’s not always something an author can predict–given the number of individuals in this world that’s a losing proposition, to try to write a work that never hurts anyone. I was not hurt by Palmer’s exploration of gender and society and use of pronouns, but again, trans people are not a monolith; and I want to be clear that people who noped out of the novel because of the pronouns (or any other reason) are entirely within their rights. I do think she was doing something interesting and definitely science fictional and that that’s fine, and that she should not have been prevented from writing with this device.
(15) CLASSIC WHO. Michael O’Donnell contributes an “it’s always new to someone on the internet” news item, a Doctor Who documentary, 30 Years In The Tardis posted on Vimeo by the director Kevin Davies around a year ago. It was originally broadcast by the BBC in 1993 to celebrate the Doctor’s 30th anniversary and never repeated (although it was included with one of the Doctor Who box sets).
Part 1:
Part 2:
(16) WELCOME TO KARLOFFORNIA. And A.V. Club remembers when “Thriller turned classic pulp stories into terrifying television”. (A post from 2014.)
… “As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this is a Thriller!” was the catchphrase associated with Thriller, the horror anthology hosted by the craggy, silver-haired Englishman who in 1960 was still the world’s most emblematic scary-movie star. Rod Serling’s nervous energy animated The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock’s laconic drawl set the tone for his eponymous suspense series. Karloff was a natural choice to join their ranks: He let viewers know what they were in for just by saying his name….
Here is the prosaic chain of events by which Thriller came to meet Weird Tales: Frye’s associate producer, Doug Benton, asked writer Charles Beaumont (The Twilight Zone) for his ideas on material to adapt for Thriller. Beaumont suggested the pulp magazine and steered Benton to superfan Forrest J. Ackerman, who owned a complete set. Ackerman wouldn’t part with his trunk of back issues but agreed to loan them to Benton, a few at a time. Benton set out to track down authors and rights, and so Thriller began to offer relatively authentic screen versions of many key Weird Tales authors: August Derleth, Harold Lawlor, Margaret St. Clair, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, and Robert Bloch. Only Lovecraft was missing.
(17) PASSING GO. Atlas Obscura goes inside the history and geography of the iconic game: “Touring the Abandoned Atlantic City Sites That Inspired the Monopoly Board”.
One of the last traces of old Atlantic City is the Claridge Hotel. Found on the corner of the two most expensive properties on the Monopoly board—Park Place and Boardwalk—the Claridge was known in its heyday as the “skyscraper by the sea.” Opened in 1930, it had an Art Deco opulence that wouldn’t be out of place in midtown Manhattan.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Michael D’Donnell, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
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@ Ghostbird. Agreed regarding Every Heart a Doorway.
After a quick review of the Crooked Timber articles, there is a third and fourth book in the series with the same characters? Does Seven Surrenders resolve anything?
The three web comics that are just killing me lately are QC, Band Vs. Band, and Guilded Age. I gave up on GA early–I love T Campbell’s work mostly, but I never got why Penny and Aggie wasn’t just a lesser Love and Rockets–but went back to it after seeing a page that interested me. It’s turned out to be far more than I’d thought.
On (2), Tolkien didn’t like the goofball dwarfs either.
I doubt he would have been impressed with John Rhys-Davies’ clown act, either, even before we get to the various mimes, uncanny CGI puppets, moon-calves and humans-pretending-to-be-dwarves in The Hobbit movies.
It was a pixel peculiar to the commentary wars of File770 that the ticks and boxes of the scrolliverse were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet.@bookworm:
Pretty much all the open mysteries are resolved, and there’s a pretty epic shift.
I think TLTL kind of brings you up to the point where you know almost everything about the world and society and what’s going on, and Seven Surrenders lets all the consequences of that play out.
7S didn’t amaze me like TLTL did, but it certainly resolves things!
All the discussion on the book means I’ve got give Too Like The Lightening another chance. I had it out of the library at a time with some other books I was excited to read and bounced hard off of the writing style right away then set it aside then returned it. At the very least it sounds like it’s generating interesting discussions.
A lot of short stories try to depict a gender-neutral future, but I don’t think very many of them succeed. In many cases, it seems as though the author originally wrote the stories with explicitly male and female characters but then made a quick pass to convert all the references to “they” or “xe” or “ve” or something like that.
The reason I think this is that these are stories where I quickly get a strong mental picture of the gender of the characters, and nothing in the story ever shakes that. Also, I’ve seen at least one where a few “shes” seem to have been left in by accident.
Contrast (for example) stories by Yoon Ha Lee, who is awfully good at this. In his stories, the non-binary characters really are nonbinary. I never feel like they’re one gender or another–or, if I do, I keep getting shaken out of that idea.
I can’t put my finger on what it is that makes the difference. Obviously part of it is in my own expectations, but, how does Yoon Ha Lee (and a few others) know what my expectations are?! 🙂
Anyway, I think it’s a difficult thing for a writer to do well. I haven’t read “Too Like the Lightening” yet, but it sounds like the protagonist is living in a future that was written by someone who didn’t do non-binary gender very well. I suppose its too much to hope that the author did that on purpose.
Chip Hitchcock
I think he’s making a joke. Atwood has insisted she doesn’t write science fiction.
Oh hi! Are we still talking about Too Like the Lightning? I can do that! ;P
I thought quite a bit about the gender issues during the first 60% of the book. I personally thought the mentioned instance of Mycroft deciding that Eureka Weeksbooth should be “they” because they barely thought of their body and then immediately going to “she” was an editing error. But as the book went along, I started to bicker with Mycroft more and more about his choices of gender for characters, realizing that he didn’t care how they thought of themselves. That was irrelevant; only his interpretation of their gender presentation mattered. Pretty fascinating, but I can see how it would be a gutpunch for those who are regularly misgendered in their daily life.
I can also see how asexual people could feel totally erased by this book.
After 60%, of course, I got punched in the face by the explicit violence and never recovered.
I will repeat from earlier threads:
1) Mycroft is not a reliable narrator. I will reserve judgment on what I think Ada Palmer did deliberately until I finish 7S.
2) Pay attention to those content warnings. They basically come right out and say you will be uncomfortable and possibly offended.
ETA: I really agree with some of the comments on Camestros’ roundup of reviews. Particularly those by Contrarius Est. Don’t know etiquette of quoting those, so I link.
@ Chip Hitchcock
the sequels to Native Tongue are IIRC moderately discrete — but I’m a bit surprised you’re doing Sower without Talents. Can you comment?
Yes, I consider the Native Tongue books a series rather than a trilogy for that reason (the same is true, arguably, for Butler’s Xenogenesis books, although I admit the lines can be fuzzy).
I not only can comment but will probably do so at length! Multiple reasons including the nature of the class, my areas of scholarly interest, and the pedagogical realities at my university (especially for an online class).
The class is a rather unique one: it was part of a major experimental movement back in the 1970s and meant to serve as a capstone interdisciplinary class with more of an emphasis on what I might call philosophy than strict “literary” studies. A few years ago, I worked with m dept. assistant head to revamp it to make it a class that our students can take more than once since different people can teach it with very different texts and approaches (thus allowing more courses in effect to be taught with the faculty we have—we’re down faculty because of previous hiring freezes, long boring story, but we’ve gone to this approach for a number of classes).
Here’s the catalog description: ENG 388 – Shaping the Future
A study of alternate possibilities for the future and the causes that might bring about those possibilities. The class focus may cover texts from different historical periods, different genres, and different cultures. The course may be repeated once when the course emphasis changes. Prerequisites: ENG 1302.
Required Reading:
Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
Unwind by Neal Shusterman
The Running Man by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
The last time I taught this class, I did far-future sff with an intersectional focus in the readings. I requested to teach it this fall again mostly because I fell so head over heels for Meg Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, and was stomping around in the wake of the election feeling like we were in one of the feminist dystopias. Other colleagues have done different readings (the prof who originated it liked to have them reading “futurology” non-fiction books back in the day).
Here’s the information I’ve written to send students who ask about the theme:
This course isn’t a traditional “literature” class because but then I’m not a “literature” teacher: my areas are creative writing, critical theory, and marginalized literatures. When I teach the few literature courses I cover (which are always options for various broad major categories rather than the required surveys), I take a more cultural studies/new historicist and sometimes reception theory approach—the lit courses I teach are the African-American literature class, the Women Writers Course, and various ‘special topics’ where I blithely have them reading sff because that’s what I do (oh, and Tolkien of course). And always, there’s readings on the socio-historical context the work was produced in, and paper assignments that are not just focusing on analyzing the text as text (new critical approach).
There’s no rule that people cannot publish on the first book in a series though many do wait because it’s a bit of a highwire rhetorical act without a net: people were publishing on the Harry Potter, and I think, the Twilight series—and of course in pop culture studies, people often publish on television series before they’re complete—heck, a medievalist friend and I co-wrote and published an essay on the Jackson’s first HOBBIT film.
And having first novels in series opens up a lot more possibilities for reading, including using more recently published work. With the exception of the Stephen King book (I put that in because I always wanted to read “Richard Bachman” and hadn’t gotten around to it), all of the books are parts of series, some tighter than the others (Butler and Shusterman’s are the most tightly connected).
I considered a lot of others; I started out, as I always do, with something like fifteen or twenty books, sigh, but know I have to reduce them because I assign other reading and a lot of writing. I’ve taught the first book in a series before in a number of classes, and since I’m not requiring them to write a new critical/close reading analysis of the theme of the (completed) work, it seems to work just fine.
I always tell them it’s the start of a trilogy or series, but make it clear the assignment does not require reading the whole thing: in the case of this class, the worldbuilding and the “what if” that led to the dystopian world will be the major focus of their project (not only what the characters and narrative voice say about the causes, but their analysis reading selected articles from a variety of ideological positions about the socio-political context the novel was written in as well as some book reviews) with the original component of their project coming from their own speculative plan for the “what if” that would turn this future to utopia (or, at least, not so dystopian).
There are two books I’d like to add but may not be able to: the first of Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast series (last time I tried to teach it the only in-print version was a single volume with all three which was more expensive), and/or Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.
@ bookworm 1398
Parable of the sower is the only one of those I have read. It was really frightening for me because it was the most realistic dystopia I’ve read – realistic in the sense that I can easily see society going from now to there. Doesn’t require any major event or evil people, things just gradually get worse.
I agree–and say that’s true for just about all of Butler’s work although her last novel, Fledgling seemed to be possibly the start of something different although we’ll never know since she died so tragically young.
p.s. I am terrible with remembering names, so don’t know if we’ve talked before (I’ve been more lurking the last mumble mumble year or so), but just wanted to say I *love* your nym!
@ Ita
I love all of Elgin’s work, and was lucky enough to stumble across her earlier paperback publications when they were published—and got to lurk and read and enjoy her LiveJournal before her death. I once nerved myself up enough to tell her how I recognized Noam Chomsky’s transformational grammar in a graduate linguistics course I had because of her use of it for the magic system in the Ozark trilogy: she said that was the first time anybody had said that to her, and I did happy dances all around the room.
I’m actually teaching the class because of all the depressing crap we’re now having (though I completely understand why you would not want to read it now). As I discuss below in my reply to Chip above, I’m going to be emphasizing the ways in which the genre of dystopia always is engaged in political commentary (and we’ll be reading online articles and essays about that issue-including how the sales of Orwell’s novel soared after Trump was elected). There will be a content note/trigger warning on my syllabus and for the individual novels as needed for that very reason.
@ Johan P: I read the article you linked to the other day, and quite agreed—I remember reading Atwood’s novel soon after it was out, and immediately seeing the parallels with Phyllis Schaffley. The problem I suspect is that most conservative women will never read Atwood who, despite her protestations, is probably still considered a “feminist” if only for the act of publishing books focusing on women! And you know being a woman in public/professional arenas, sigh.
@Various: re Ada Palmer’s TLTL
I started it, bounced hard off the narrator/narrative voice, but that happened with Kameron Hurley’s latest work as well. I figure I’ll hold onto them (easy enough in ebook format) because they may be fantastic to read at a later date. I’m loving the conversation here about it!
@Dawn: I am always talking about Too Like The Lightning. 😛
(It’s just that kind of book. A gift that keeps on giving 🙂 )
@Greg —
I just love it when people think they’re entitled to slam a book that they haven’t even read. Really.
Disclaimer: I think this book is brilliant. I understand how people might dislike it or be angry with parts of it, but I have no idea how people who have actually read it could say that it isn’t an incredibly impressive work.
Please, oh please. If you haven’t read it, don’t presume to criticize.
@Standback:
I think it’s telling that even though I think 7S will be tremendously difficult for me to read, I am steeling myself already because TLtL was so damn compelling. My socks went missing early on, and then I started grappling with the narrator to get them back, and now I think Martin Guildbreaker has them. I will trust him with those socks until my Hugo reading is finished.
(If Seven Surrenders drops the ball I am gonna flip a table. 😉 )
Hah, I just clicked a notification from Goodreads about new books from authors on my shelves:
1. “Oh, Robin Hobb.”
2. “Yep, Borne‘s on hold for when I’m done Hugo reading.”
3. “City of Miracles City of Miracles City of Miracles City of Miracles!!!!”
Since City of Stairs just got brought up I thought you’d be entertained. 🙂
“Scroll direktly into jail. Do not file God”
All the scrolls seem in tune on a spring afternoon when you’re poisoning pixels in the park.
Meredith Moment: Steven Erikson’s Gardens Of The Moon (the first volume in the Malazan Book of The Fallen series) is available for $2.99 from the usual digital dispensers.
Rob Thornton
Now there’s a book I bounced off hard as well. I might get it for $2.99 though and try again because I’m reading through Ninefox Gambit and think I’ve hit the right ‘There’s no context to what is happening at all yet but I’m going to not worry about it and see what happens’ state of mind to potentially enjoy it. People love it so much I want to be in with that love fest but it might not just be for me. $3 isn’t a bad price to figure that out though.
Leap up and down, scroll your pixels in the air
@Matt That first book is rough, its no mistake. If you get through it and into the second book, IMO, a lot of stuff becomes clear, but expecting people to suffer a book to get their feet under them for a world is a big big ask.
@Ky–thanks for the explanation. Nothing I found anywhere used allocentric that way. Wikipedia got me: “Allocentrism is a collectivistic personality attribute whereby people center their attention and actions on other people rather than themselves. It is a psychological dimension which corresponds to the general cultural dimension of collectivism.” Which is about as clear as mud.
Whereas Miriam-Webster got this: “having one’s interest and attention centered on other persons ” Which in my day was just called being nosy.
I have a sneaking feeling that this is something that came out of a gender studies class.
Perhaps a better choice would have been “sexual allocentrism” in this case.
@Dawn:
ROTFL
I am now imagining Martin Guildbreaker methodically cataloging an immense collection of socks. All the readers with socks knocked off, have no fear. Martin is taking good care of them.
@Matt Y:
From the start, I’ve been saying TLTL is a fantastic book, but really not everybody’s cup of tea. If it doesn’t click for you, it’s probably a LOT to wade through.
That being said, I dearly wanted to see TLTL get a Hugo nom, because I know it’s good for an eon or two of great community conversation. It’s great to be chewing over a meaty novel with you all 🙂
@Matthew Johnson:
Hey, thank you so much! That’s the kind of thing that makes me feel I got things right 🙂
@Matt Y – I just bought Gardens of the Moon for the same reason. I also recall someone at File770 giving a strong recommendation for the series a couple years back.
My current views on Too Like the Lightning: After reading it I am still wearing my socks: one on my head and the other is stuck up my nose and the third I’m wearing as a disturbing armband. The odd thing was that I wasn’t wearing socks when I started. Also, I now have encyclopedia about socks.
[eta: I don’t think these are Dawn’s socks]
I found the review linked in today’s Scroll so flawed I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from it about the handling of gender in the book.
The reviewer states that the narrator’s observation “Gender, we were supposed to be past that too” is asserting the book’s setting as post-gender. It seems pretty obvious to me that the sentence is undermining that idea. To say we’re supposed to be past something is an acknowledgement that we’re not.
One of my socks can now bring sock holes to life; the other has developed an intimate knowledge of all the pain in the universe.
Bring out the sockpuppets!
@John A Arkansawyer:
Something I loved about that development in Band vs. Band:
Jura Ubarl sernxf bhg gung fur qbrfa’g xabj jung fur’f qbvat, naq Ghecf vzzrqvngryl fgbcf naq fnlf “Url. Lbh jnaan fgbc?” Lrf Ghecf gung’f zl tvey gung’f rknpgyl ubj vg’f qbar. Zhpu ybir.
@Standback:
Something that kept going through my head while reading, my gift to you 😉
How to Recognize a Mason
ETA @Camestros: I’m really digging your Notes Ignota series!
I’m still working on a fuller discussion on this* but…
one aspect of this is the focus on 18th-century French aristocracy and gender depictions among that society at the time and how they contrast with ours. Now that society was regressive and patriarchal and had all sorts of hang-ups but our expectations (filtered through later Victorian attitudes*) don’t map neatly in the way we might expect.
So, yes, I think Palmer is trying to do a lot with gender in the books but not always successfully and there are clashing perspectives that don’t marry up well: i.e. Mycroft’s skewed view of a group of people who are trying to revive gender norms in an ostensibly post-gender society but doing so based on 18th-century French aristocracy’s gender norms rather than 20th century US ones. Which is just too hard to unpick as a reader, particularly with lots of other things going on.
Thanks! It’s more work than I intended 🙂 even though there are fewer notes as the book proceeds.
@Dawn Incognito: Ghecragvar vf fb terng! Fur pbhyq gryy gung Ubarl jnagrq gb naq qvqa’g jnag gb naq jnf fher naq lrg abg fher naq zbivat obgu jnlf ng bapr, naq fur unaqyrq vg va n jnl gung yrsg gur qbbe bcra ohg qvqa’g chfu ure guebhtu. Fur pbhyq’ir uheg Ubarl gur boivbhf jnl, ol chfuvat ure, ohg fur nyfb pbhyq’ir uheg ure gur aba-boivbhf jnl ol chyyvat gbb sne onpx.
Ubarl vf cerggl terng, gbb, sbe gnxvat guvf cyhatr fb qrpvfviryl. Ghecf unf unq tveysevraqf, ohg V qba’g guvax irel znal. Ure urneg zvtug or zber graqre guna Ubarl’f. Vs Ubarl unq onpxrq bss rneyvre, vg jbhyq’ir uheg Ghecf.
V whfg ubcr Ubarl qbrfa’g trg ure urneg oebxra ol ure onaq. Gur Pnaql Urnegf ner bxnl crbcyr, ohg Gur Fbheonyyf ner gur barf V’q jnag va zl onaq. Gurl ernyyl frrz yvxr orggre crbcyr, ba nirentr.
Speaking both as a comics fan and a music fan, I love Band Vs. Band. Since we’re right at a climactic point, that link goes to the first page. There are only about three hundred, so it’s not that hard to catch up.
If someone wants a pointer to a later starting point, ask and I’ll find one.
I got a pair of Ash vs Evil Dead socks 1-2 weeks ago and they didn’t fit! DIZZAPPOINTED!
@Camestros Felapton
So definitely not poking fun at current popular non-binary stories? I have to admit the idea tickled me of a viewer dropped into one of the stories going, “wait a minute–that’s one’s male . . .”
Nope. It came out of the ace community.
Allo is to ace (and aro) as cis is to trans.
“Sexual allocentrism” would be as much of a tautology as “gender ciscentrism”
@Greg Hullender:
I don’t see Palmer as poking fun at current non-binary stories at all. I see it more as her attempting a thought experiment that is deliberately controversial, in several different ways.
Quoted from her website:
Contrarius: I understand how people might dislike it or be angry with parts of it, but I have no idea how people who have actually read it could say that it isn’t an incredibly impressive work.
I’ve read it all. I slogged through it. I don’t think it’s “impressive”. I think it is a plethora of interesting ideas all crammed into a book, with an only-partially-successful attempt at constructing a plot which ties those interesting ideas together.
To me, “impressive” would have been actually getting a coherent plot that doesn’t have holes the size of the Grand Canyon in it.
@ robinareid
Wish I could take your course. I am a huge Elgin fan. A friend running a used bookstore got me the Ozark series, as well as her DAW (Coyote) books, after I had raved to her about Native Tongue and Judas Rose. I’m still hoping to name a cat after Nazareth, one of my favorite characters ever. I also have The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defense, but no poetry. Will have to look for the items on your syllabus that I haven’t read.
@JJ —
Please feel free to name some of these plot holes.
@Ky: so the ace community thinks it’s Humpty Dumpty, Definer of Words? That may work within their own discussions, but using it outside the lodge will be … unclear.
Contrarius: Please feel free to name some of these plot holes.
Gurer ner nccneragyl zntvp be zvenphybhf cbjref ninvynoyr va guvf jbeyq. Jr xabj bs ng yrnfg bar crefba jub unf gurz. Abguvat va gur jbeyqohvyqvat vaqvpngrf gung gurer vf nal cerprqrag be ernfba sbe fbzrbar univat fhpu cbjref, be ubj gurl jbhyq unir pbzr nobhg. Vg’f whfg n enaqbz guvat gung unf orra fghpx va gur obbx, juvpu unf abguvat gb qb jvgu nalguvat ryfr va gur fgbel.
Gur frira uvirf ner fbzrjung neovgenel qrfvtangvbaf. Jul gurfr cnegvphyne frira, naq abg bguref juvpu ner whfg nf srnfvoyr? Jul bayl gurfr frira, naq abg svsgrra, be gjragl-guerr? Naq gur erny punyyratr gb qvforyvrs vf ubj qvq gurl znantr gb trg rirelbar va gur ragver jbeyq gb ohl vagb, naq cnegvpvcngr va, guvf aba-trbtencuvp qvivfvba bs nyyrtvnaprf? Jung vapragvir jbhyq gurer or sbe crbcyr gb qb fb?
Gur Yvfg — naq gur crbcyr jub perngr gur yvfgf — ner irel, irel vzcbegnag naq vasyhragvny. Jr xabj guvf, orpnhfr jr ner gbyq guvf ercrngrqyl. Naq lrg jr ner arire tvira nal ernfba be uvfgbel gb oryvrir gung gur Yvfgf naq gur crbcyr jub jevgr gurz jbhyq or vzcbegnag. Arne nf V pna gryy, gur Rzcrebe fnvq, “Bxnl, jr ner tbvat gb unir n crefba sebz rnpu Uvir perngr n n yvfg bs jub gurl guvax gur zbfg vasyhragvny crbcyr va gur jbeyq ner, va beqre ol nzbhag bs vasyhrapr, naq rirelbar va gur jbeyq zhfg nterr gung gur yvfg-znxref’ whqtzragf ner inyvq, naq gurersber, onfrq ba gur yvfgf, qb…” Qb jung? Jul? Jul fubhyq nalbar pner nobhg gur Yvfgf? Ubj qb gurl fhccbfrqyl nssrpg jung unccraf va guvf jbeyq?
Pnaare vf n znff gbeghere naq zheqrere, naq nyy gur jbeyq yrnqref xabj guvf. Lrg gurl nyy gehfg uvz jvgu gbc-yriry frpergf naq cevingr vasbezngvba, qrfcvgr gur snpg gung guvf tvirf uvz na vaperqvoyr novyvgl gb oynpxznvy, znavchyngr, haqrezvar, naq/be qrfgebl gurz nf yrnqref. Guvf vf abg ubj cbjreshy crbcyr jub jvfu gb ergnva gurve cbjre jbhyq orunir.
Oh, I hate that encryption thing. I agree that it’s a good thing to use in this case, but you’ll have to remind me where to find the key!
No worries — there was no way I was going to put all that in plain text, because it’s spoilery as hell. 😀
http://rot13.com
Chip HItchcock, to be fair, EVERY community defines their own words. Technical jargon, slang, in-jokes… Here, we have “godstalk”, just for one obvious example.
Most such in-group vocabulary never makes it out into the wild world, but sometimes it does. Especially when there’s no good equivalent in general use. “Cisgendered” would be one obvious example of a relatively recent coinage that is now in much more general use.
From what I’ve been able to determine via Google, the terms more commonly used are allosexist or allosexual. Which I was totally going to coin if they didn’t already exist.
@Cassy B: I don’t think I’ve ever heard ciscentric before, and I’m pretty sure it has no meaning other than the opposite (sort of) of transcentric. Allocentric is an existing word with an existing meaning which is perpendicular to the new one. Qualifying it with “sexual” is different in this case, and useful.
ETA: And now I’m wondering if allo being opposite to both aro and ace means there doesn’t need to be a further distinction with “romantic allocentrism”.
1. You now have a definition if you run across allo again
2. This originally came up in a trigger warning, and from other discussions I’ve seen most of the people who needed the warning knew what it meant.
For those looking for more info on allo in its various variations, try this twitter thread (not mine): https://twitter.com/mikaylamic/status/838857673391108096
I’ve only seen allo- before in primatology in the compound allo-mother, which refers to non-biological parents who act as a parent to another’s baby. Allo-mothering is quite common in some primate species and other mammal and bird species.
Well, and also in linguistics – allophones, allomorphs, etc. So allosexual makes sense to me. Allocentral less so.
@Ky: So how does someone aro and allocentric, versus someone ace and allocentric, know which allocentric the trigger warning refers to?