(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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@JJ —
1. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. No, it’s not random — it’s part of the whole point about things not being as they seem. Readers may not know the reason for it yet, but that does not make it a hole.
2. Every story picks certain setups and not other setups; you may not like the setups, but it isn’t a plot hole just because other setups could have been chosen. As for incentive and getting other people to buy in, that’s explained — again, not a plot hole.
3. You have only to look at our media today — reality shows, “Most Influential People” lists, actors and reality-show stars getting elected president, and so on — to see how these could grow into what we see in the book. Again, not a hole.
4. It is true that we don’t know the reason for this yet — but, again, delayed explanation is not the same thing as a hole. There is indeed a reason for it. Refer back to #1 for a similar not-a-hole.
Sorry, but none of your supposed holes are actual holes — just as I suspected. In fact, judging by your list of supposed holes, I’m not sure you really understand what “plot hole” means. Here’s one definition: “In fiction, a plot hole, plothole or plot error is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot. Such inconsistencies include such things as illogical or impossible events, and statements or events that contradict earlier events in the storyline.”
Again — please feel free to point out any such holes within this book.
ftfy
How does someone tell the difference beween “bow”, “bow”, and “bow”, or between “book” and “book.”?
I don’t speak for every ace or aro person out there, only for myself. If it isn’t obvious by context, I’ll start with the broadest definiton and take it as covering both allosexual and alloromantic.
Wow, Contrarius, that’s kind of condescending. JJ is perfectly capable of answering, but my understanding is that they* are judging Too Like the Lightning as a self-contained entity. And it simply doesn’t stand on its own.
I picture Ada Palmer excitedly selling the first novel of her proposed trilogy. Then it came time for editing.
I would call TLtL very impressive, in that it made a strong impression on me. Sure thing. I’ve really enjoyed discussing it over the past couple of days. But.
Would I say I liked it? I don’t know. Would I say it’s a good book? I don’t know. Would I say it makes any sense? On its own, hell no. I consider it half a book, and although I thought the setting was fantastic and the prose dazzling, it’s near No Award on my Hugo ballot because it doesn’t have an ending.
(It’s ahead of The Obelisk Gate, because at least it has a beginning.)
*JJ, do you have a preferred personal pronoun on the internet? I’ve seen both gendered ones used and you never comment. Considering the subject matter, I would rather not guess.
…so the self-appointed hangin’ judge can disallow them?
If you want to have a conversation, Contra, you should probably recognize that you’re a participant in it, not the boss of it. Treating other people’s opinions with such disdain, telling them what definitions they’re allowed to use and directing them to keep trying is not polite interaction.
Whether or not you consider them plot holes, they are certainly things which to me make the story a jumble and inconsistent.
2. Every story picks certain setups and not other setups; you may not like the setups, but it isn’t a plot hole just because other setups could have been chosen. As for incentive and getting other people to buy in, that’s explained
I didn’t think it was explained, at least not in an “Oh, I could see how that might happen” sort of way.
3. You have only to look at our media today — reality shows, “Most Influential People” lists, actors and reality-show stars getting elected president, and so on — to see how these could grow into what we see in the book.
Nope. I can see here, but I don’t see how “here” would logically get to “there”. The people who hold influence in real life hold it for a reason (however spurious a reason, aka movie star, that might be) — and apart from, I think, one person who is mentioned as having been a popular actor, there’s nothing to make me think the rest of them would somehow have attained that influence.
And what is the point of the Lists? What do they accomplish? The book doesn’t ever say — it just keeps telling us, over and over again, that they are very, very important.
I’ve seen a number of people talk about how brilliant the book is, but their explanations of why it’s brilliant don’t work for me. Perhaps that is due to a deficit in my own educational background, of having only a basic familiarity with the Enlightenment and the Great Philosophers. But… I may not be a Rhodes Scholar, but I am still pretty intelligent. And the book reads like a muddled jumble of ideas — much of it in badly tedious prose, to me.
As far as the “readers don’t know that yet” explanations for just about everything — well, that’s really the problem, isn’t it? And it’s probably why the book is going below No Award on my ballot. It’s not a whole book, and I’m not going to vote to give a Hugo to half a book.
I’ve read any number of novels which leave plenty of mysteries for subsequent books, but still form a whole book on their own. This isn’t one of them.
Palmer’s supporters would have done well to wait until next year and nominate the two as a whole work. Because now this book is no longer eligible, so they can’t do that next year.
@Ky: Thanks for the correction. I started with it that way, but then changed it. I wondered about the distinction because it was in the context of a trigger warning. For that purpose, it seems useful one way if it’s one word, broader, and more easily used, and useful a different way if it’s two words, narrower, and less easily used.
Why allocentric instead of allonormative? I’m used to that terminology from heteronormative, and I’d’ve thought that’d be the term.
Dawn Incognito: do you have a preferred personal pronoun on the internet? I’ve seen both gendered ones used and you never comment. Considering the subject matter, I would rather not guess.
Thank you being considerate and asking. I’ve been referred to as either on here, and I really am not fussed about it, because I’ve had a privileged enough life (and have become self-confident enough in my dotage) to not be able to care.
Apart from relationships and sex (where I am cis), my own personal loves and preferences and hobbies are not gender-dependent — and are very often not gender-conforming (if that makes sense to you). This was a source of frustration when I was a minor, and one in my marriage (because my partner apparently had, along with their own very serious issues, some gender-performance expectations of me which I didn’t find out about for years) but is no longer an issue, because now nobody gets to be The Boss of Me.
So you can use whichever you feel reflects your perception of me, or with which you feel most comfortable: he, she, or they; I won’t care or be offended in any case.
I’ve seen allomer, allotrope, and allopath (what most doctors are).
@Cassy B: coining a new word (or jamming words together) is different; what I was pointing to was redefining an existing word — in this case, to something that did not fit the meanings of its components.
@JJ, I’ll tell you a little secret: when I first saw your avatar, it reminded me of a Cardassian. So for the first six months or so, I pictured you as looking like Gul Dukat. 😉
(who is one of my favourite DS9 characters I’m so ashamed)
Dawn Incognito: when I first saw your avatar, it reminded me of a Cardassian. So for the first six months or so, I pictured you as looking like Gul Dukat.
Oh, that is hilarious! Thanks for sharing that! 😀
The reality is a little less exciting, but understandable, if you recall the discussions of where the Jovian and Dragon Award trophies came from.
After commenting on File770 for a while, I decided that I needed an avatar, but I couldn’t be arsed to put a lot of thought into it. So I picked something I could see in my room.
@JJ: I’ve wondered for quite a while WTH your avatar was, so thanks for the link! It still looks like some creature from non-Euclidean space to me, though. 😉
@JJ
Great avatar story. Good points on Too Light Lightning also.
Kendall: It still looks like some creature from non-Euclidean space to me, though.
I dunno, I’m thinking about changing to a Gul Dukat avatar now. 😉
@Dawn —
“Simply doesn’t stand on its own” is actually a different claim than JJ made. As I’ve mentioned somewhere-or-other before, I can sympathize with those who make that particular complaint — and seeing as how the duology was originally intended to be a single novel, it’s an unsurprising complaint to have. But that isn’t the complaint that JJ has made in this thread.
@Kurt —
First, productive communication is impossible if we don’t use the same definitions for our terms of discussion. If one person calls a square a circle and the other calls a circle a triangle, we’ll never get anywhere. Definitions matter.
Second, I’m not actually treating anyone’s opinions with disdain. I am rebutting false claims of fact. The issues that have been put forward as plot holes are simply not as claimed.
@JJ —
How does a setup you don’t happen to like make a story “a jumble and inconsistent”? How do unresolved mysteries make a story “a jumble and inconsistent”? There is nothing actually inconsistent or jumbled about them — they are simply unresolved at the end of the first book, as often happens in a series.
Again — you may fault the worldbuilding here and complain that you were not able to suspend your disbelief because of an inadequate foundation for it, but that’s a different sort of issue than plot holes.
You seem to be having some significant memory lapses regarding many of the details of the characters in the book. I won’t waste time or create more spoilers by detailing how other characters got to where they were in the book, but those explanations are indeed there.
What are the points of any of the lists our media puts out today? Publicity — celebrity — is becoming ever more important in our own society. The book posits a society in which publicity and the cult of celebrity have become even more so. I don’t see anything especially surprising or unbelievable about that.
And that’s fine. To each their own, and all that. I’ve got no issue with folks who bounce off any book for some reason — we’ve all got our own personal tastes — but it seriously annoys me when folks explain their dislike of a particular book by making false claims about the book’s contents.
The two most important words in your statement: “to me”. You think it is “a muddled jumble” with “badly tedious prose” — and you have every right to your own opinion. But not to your own facts.
One reason I asked you to provide examples of your posited plot holes is that I’m very interested in this book and the widely disparate reactions people have to it. If people had actually found plot holes, I’d love to know about them; there is so much to unpack in this book that I know I’ve missed a lot of things that others are likely to have caught. However, you didn’t actually find any. What you actually seem to have found was that the worldbuilding didn’t have enough explanation behind it to work for you, and you were annoyed that the mysteries weren’t all explained by the end of the first book; and again, you are welcome to those opinions.
Why is it a problem? It’s pretty common for the first book in a series to have unresolved mysteries. It’s a series, after all.
Personally, I’m very disappointed that Tor didn’t simply publish both books in the same year. Then the two could have been treated as Blackout/All Clear was. But they didn’t ask us!
@Contrarius: I haven’t de-rotated JJ’s post, but we’ve previously had some really nice conversation about why some things worked really poorly for them, and really well for me. I love TLTL with the heat of a thousand suns; it’s one of the most impressive, exciting books I’ve read in years; and I love how the Hugo nomination means lots of people buzzing about it — but I’d be fooling myself if I thought it had no holes, or that every reader “should” appreciate it as I do.
You can’t convince somebody that a book “should” have impressed them; at best, you can point out what impressed you. And if the book was opaque or dense to the point that other readers didn’t draw the same conclusions you did, well, that’s a choice the author made — and if the result is that a lot of readers don’t understand what the author wanted them to, or came out frustrated, that can be a failure of the author, or just a reader this book Just Isn’t For. Again, all you can do is lay out your own reading of matters.
And even when I have good reasons for things that bothered other readers, I can explain them, but I can’t say “that shouldn’t have bothered you to begin with.” If that’s what they got from the book, that’s between them and the author 😛
And word to the wise: saying “I knew you’d write things that are wrong” is a poor way to win hearts or minds 😛
I hadn’t known “allocentrism” either.
Sounds like “Trigger warning: allocentrism” can just be inscribed onto the interior of the womb 😛
I actually think TLTL is much more Hugo-worthy than TLTL and 7S together.
Having read 7S, it’s actually much more distinct than TLTL’s abrupt conclusion might lead you to believe. And while I enjoyed it, I think each should be considered separately.
I think of it as “TLTL sets all the dominoes up; 7S knocks all of them down.” 7S is satisfying, but it’s TLTL that I think is brilliant.
(I also think the odds of getting a nomination as a duology is much slimmer than getting one for the book on its own. It’s just harder, in terms of procedure. Enough people loved TLTL on its own, ending and all, that I think saying “well they SHOULD have nominated it as a duology with a book they haven’t read yet” seems a little silly 😛 )
Contrarius: I am rebutting false claims of fact.
You are arguing that your reading of the book is more right than mine. I am not making “false claims” about the book; I am saying things about my reading of it with which you disagree.
It’s been several months now since I read the book. I am posting based on what I can remember at this point. No doubt I could make a better case for my point-of-view if I re-read it and took notes, but I am not going back and spending more hours reading again a book which I found to be tedious and deeply flawed the first time.
I get that you love it and found it brilliant, and that you can’t understand why other people wouldn’t feel that way as well. I thought that Ancillary Justice was absolutely brilliantly done in numerous ways, but a lot of people disagreed with me on that.
I would be more interested in seeing detailed explanations of the different ways in which you thought it was brilliant, and why. So far most of the reviews I have read have made claims like “cleverly plays with gender expectations” — but which don’t actually explain what they mean by that. For instance, I found that Mycroft’s continued deliberate misgendering of people amounted to “Oh, look at me, I’m such a renegade, I’m deliberately breaking society’s rules, and the way that these people perceive their own identities is of no importance to me”.
I don’t see anything particularly “clever” about that. The “here’s a society where gender identities have been eliminated, identifying as male or female is not allowed and is severely punished, and here’s a misfit trying to be male or female” trope has been done repeatedly in speculative fiction. What is particularly clever about the way Palmer is doing it?
Perhaps what I need to do is wait until someone publishes a detailed analysis of all the ways the book is brilliant, aka Too Like the Lightning for Dummies. My fear is that I would find such an analysis as opaque and unsatisfying as the book itself.
Without getting into the discussion of TLTL (haven’t read it yet), I did really appreciate the link to Yoon Ha Lee’s Dreamwidth. After reading his response to the criticism of Palmer’s novel, I found this post about his own:
Ninefox Gambit: A Reflection
I had just finished reading NG today, so I was ready to read that post. The first four chapters were hard (but rewarding!) work which I went about slowly over the last few days, and then I hit a tipping point this morning and couldn’t put it down until it was over.
I have also been listening to the audiobook of Midnight Riot (checked out from the library! Technology is keen) and enjoying the heck out of it. I doubt it’ll win my top vote based on what I’ve listened to so far–too much a beat-by-beat police procedural, even if UF–but the combination of this particular narrator and the dry humor of the POV character’s narration are constantly making me chuckle.
Geez, I have the screen brightness turned so far down all the time, I thought JJ was a sloth hanging vertically in a dark forest (Gender unknown). I also have a low-res screen, and a small one, so the avatar is about half an inch square. Which is why my avatar is bright and simple.
@Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little
That Ninefox link was super-interesting, thank you. I liked Yoon Ha Lee referring to magitech because that’s how I ended up reading the book – tech indistinguishable from magic.
I’m glad Midnight Riot/Rivers of London is doing its thing for you and others. As you say, it’s probably not going to get too many top votes but it’s a very readable series. (IIRC Aaranovitch’s reaction was along the lines of “Woo I’m a finalist! But look at the other finalists, I’m doomed!”)
@JJ and others
I’m not sure that “plot hole” is quite the right term, but I know what you mean; there are a lot of elements that require you to trust that an explanation is coming – not even in the same book, but later – and that’s potentially a big ask. One of my earliest reactions was that I felt very frustrated that the book was demanding a great deal without giving anything up in advance, not just with explanations but with sitting still for infodumps, the deliberate opacity of many elements, and so on. That’s obviously a very individual reaction, and part of it is that I would normally expect a book to “pay” for my patience with something else, like grabbing me with a character or a plotline. To be fair, the worldbuilding was intriguing enough to keep me going, but unfortunately I took against most of the characters (with the possible exception of Mycroft, except that Palmer dropped a bomb on that as well!) so that element wasn’t there to pull me along.
The thing I will say about TLTL is that I’ve really enjoyed talking about it!
ETA: OK, so JJ is now a Cardassian Sloth. That’s…a thing.
lurkertype: Can you check the email at the address you used to register at F770 — or else send an email to me at mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com — so I can pass on some info to you?
Mark: OK, so JJ is now a Cardassian Sloth. That’s…a thing.
I don’t think that I’m talented enough with Photoshop to manage that. But hey! If there’s a Filer who wants to try, I will gladly pay you on Tuesday. 😉
ETA: Ooo! Artwork on commission from RedWombat might be an option! (Although, considering her book-writing, book-touring, art-drawing, comic-writing, blogging, bizarre-food-podcasting, gardening, bird-watching, and potato-ranting, I am utterly convinced that that poor woman never gets any sleep as it is.)
@JJ:
I’m feeling the need for this as well, and I’m hoping to write up some proper pieces on it — I hope during May, but we’ll see how much breathing time I have 😛
Specifically as to gender, I just wrote this piece which, indeed, tries to explain why what Palmer does is so interesting. I’d actually love to hear your reaction to it, particularly if it’s the kind of piece you’re looking for 🙂
(I don’t think this is about gender expectations at all, BTW. It’s much more along the lines of “You know, society has some really huge issues with gender. Do you know that? What kind of things can we conceivably do about that? Damn, this is gonna be hard.”)
That being said, I think TLTL has a lot to it beyond gender issues, and I hope I’ll be able to give those some spotlight as well 🙂
@Mark: I think that’s a really interesting observation. The combination of Bridger and the sensayer system grabbed me completely right from the very start; I felt the book was both promising and immediately providing some fantastic payoff in terms of religion, social tension, and how you manage a diverse society.
…I need to write that up at more length. But I absolutely agree: that’s the kind of thing that will grab some readers and not others, and if the book doesn’t grab you from the start, it’s going to be rough going.
@Standback
The sensayer system is probably a good example of a personal reaction – I found it interesting but not compelling. This may well be that as I’m not religious my interest in it was purely academic, whereas I think you’ve mentioned elsewhere that you are?
This is probably one reason why Palmer has thrown so many elements in – political systems, religion, gender, philosophy – because hopefully at least one of them will grab your interest.
From what I’ve seen, allocentric leans towards the broader meaning. People needing narrower words sometimes use allonormative for the sexual side and amatoromantic for the romance side, but different parts of the ace and aro community have different preferences so you’d have to ask the writer of the article why they made that choice.
I do note that they also used ciscentric instead of cisnormative.
@JJ —
Well, yes — in the same way that if you called the sky green, I would argue that the sky is actually blue.
Let’s back up just a tad.
There are different types of complaints about books. For instance, if I said “I couldn’t connect with the characters in Underground Railroad“, that’s a purely subjective opinion. There is no right or wrong to it — it’s simply my personal impression.
But if I said something like “I just hated Prince of Thorns. It was unrealistic because it depicted a 10-year-old boy raping women”, well, that’s a false claim. There were not actually any 10-year-old boys raping women in that book.
See the difference? Some complaints are purely opinion and not subject to objective rebuttal — but some are.
In the case of TLTL, a complaint like “I wasn’t convinced by the conditions the society was built upon” is a subjective opinion. Not a matter for rebuttal; either you were convinced or you weren’t. But a complaint like “There were plot holes as huge as the Grand Canyon” is a complaint of fact; it makes claims about the structure of the plot that can be objectively proven or disproven.
I have still not been able to write a coherent review of this book, because there is just so much going on in it — it would take thousands of words to reach even a vague approximation of everything that needs to be discussed about it (as you can tell by all the ongoing reviews and discussions currently available across the net). But here is a rather incoherent rant I posted on another site some time ago when someone else asked about it:
“This is multi-layered — many many things going on in plot and character and theme. It makes your brain cells start popping and fizzing with all the ideas and references and complications and interactions. It’s talking about transformation in so many ways, and artifice, and science, and miracle, and pretense vs. reality, and cult of personality vs. meritocracy, and the one thing you would do anything to protect, and what that “anything” might actually entail, and it will sound like an entirely different novel depending on who you talk to about it. And it’s a loving and sardonic homage to the age of Voltaire and de Sade in both style and substance. And I’ve got tons of love for all of the fireworks going off in all directions. Nothing about it is truly straightforward.”
For me, the handling of gender was only one of many aspects of the book showing us that appearance and social consensus are not always the same things as reality. In this case, it’s playing with gender as a social construct, and societal claims vs. societal realities. This society claims to be gender-neutral and sexually liberated, but it is clearly neither in reality. At one point Mycroft tells us that the mere mention of a gendered pronoun would instantly make members of his culture picture seductions and torrid sex scenes. At another point Mycroft calls a certain character male while someone else calls that same character female. At another point Mycroft calls a character female because of that character’s current occupation while casually describing that character’s beard. And all the major political leaders of Mycroft’s world cergraq gb or cneg naq cnepry bs guvf fhccbfrqyl rtnyvgnevna naq traqreyrff fbpvrgl juvyr npghnyyl orvat envfrq naq raphyghengrq ol n cebsbhaqyl traqre-qvssreragvngrq oebgury-fynfu-phyg urnqdhnegref evsr jvgu evtvqyl rasbeprq traqre ebyrf naq negvsvpvnyvgl.
But gender isn’t the main issue here; it’s all part and parcel of the idea of claim vs. reality. As I said before — nothing is as it seems. And remember, the book is in many ways an homage and exploration of Enlightenment ideas — just as de Sade was making larger points about politics and religion and philosophy and society when he wrote scandalously transgressive “erotica”, Palmer is doing more than writing about which gender pronoun someone chooses. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes a gendered pronoun is more than a gendered pronoun.
But a complaint like “There were plot holes as huge as the Grand Canyon” is a complaint of fact; it makes claims about the structure of the plot that can be objectively proven or disproven.
That depends on what you mean by ‘plot hole’.
One kind of plot hole is an actual inconsistency. E.g. if a character is in New York at one moment, and two minutes later is on the moon, and their society does not have superfast travel, that’s a plot hole, and whether that sort of plot hole exists is indeed an objective matter.
But ‘plot hole’ can also be used for a failure to explain things; and as no work can explain everything, what requires explanation is a matter of subjective judgement.
Some people also call it a plot hole when characters behave irrationally; but it’s a matter of personal judgement both what is rational, and what degree of irrationality can be tolerated.
Certainly sometimes, when people claim a work has plot holes, they do seem to be claiming there is something objectively wrong with it, which people are actually irrational for failing to recognise. That was the attitude of many people towards Blackout/All Clear: they wrote as if it could be objectively proved that the work was rubbish, so that those who liked it were not simply making a bad judgement, but failing to recognise obvious facts. But it seems that that’s not what JJ means by plot holes; they are talking about failures of explanation, which are a subjective matter.
@Andrew —
Which is why definitions are important. As I said earlier. 😉
Ehhhhh, not really. Refer back to the definition I provided: “In fiction, a plot hole, plothole or plot error is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot.”
What you are describing is more like a hanging thread — some plot element left unexplained. And I agree with you that the perception of hanging threads (how much “hanging” — lack of explanation — is acceptable) are much more a matter of subjective interpretation than plot holes are.
Right. This is a good part of my point — this type of complaint makes claims of fact.
Again, right. JJ has described their complaint as a factual claim by labeling it a plot hole (thereby making the complaint appear to be a strong, objective critique), but actually the complaint is purely subjective — a matter of not personally being convinced (and subjective critiques are much weaker than objective ones).
Ehhhhh, not really. Refer back to the definition I provided: “In fiction, a plot hole, plothole or plot error is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot.”
Well, I think the term often is used that way, and if the definition fails to capture it, that’s a fault in the definition. I’m not convinced the definition does fail to capture it, though. What do you think ‘gap’ means? Something different from inconsistency, I take it. I’d suppose it meant something left out which you need in order to understand the narrative – so, a failure of explanation.
JJ has described their complaint as a factual claim by labeling it a plot hole (thereby making the complaint appear to be a strong, objective critique)
Only if you interpret their statement in the light of a conception of ‘plot hole’ which you introduced into the discussion.
Contrarius:
* trigger warnings on this *
True. We do not know what age Jorn Ancrath was when he raped women. We only know that he was very young when he said that he had raped women.
On the other hand, I think we could agree that the statement from the person would most likely be true about not liking the book, regardless of if the boy was 11 or 13 or another age when he raped women.
And we would most likely say that the person who dismissed the opinion, only based on the age of the boy, was a complete asshole.
@JJ:
This post with the linked animated .gif made me laugh so hard I scared the cat. I look forward to your new non-euclidean Cardassian sloth avatar 😉
And I followed your links to Monarch Glass and now I covet one of those lantern bowls. *covet covet*
My understanding of many complaints about Blackout/All Clear is that several are based on real factual errors in geography and history. So waving the whole thing off as subjective is almost entirely undermining your own point.
@ John A. Arkansawyer
The two terms — to the extent that they parallel heteronormative/heterocentric — have different nuances, while sharing a certain amount of semantic territory as well. (This is pretty common in sociological terminology.)
If I were to define how I would use them differentially, “allonormative” would refer to the tendency to shoehorn behaviors/attitudes/reactions into an allo-sexual/romantic framework. That is, to reinterpret things as “really” being allo-sexual/romantic but perhaps just a flawed version of it. So, for example, if a woman says she’s asexual and someone responds, “You’re not asexual, you’re just frigid. We can fix that.” that’s allonormative behavior.
In contrast, I’d use “allocentric” in the sense “prioritizing and centering the allo-sexual/romantic experience above other types of experience.” So, for example — and I’m going to use a real-life example here — my experience of the Society for Creative Anachronism was that it was overwhelmingly and oppressively allocentric because all the symbolic structures revolved around assumption that one was participating as part of a couple, even if the “couple” was only symbolic and not based on an actual interpersonal relationship. Allonormative wouldn’t describe that phenomenon quite as well because it wasn’t that the existence of non-paired participants was denied, just that they were, in many senses, treated as second-class participants.
As I say, this is how I would distinguish and use the two terms myself, if I were using them. Others may have somewhat different nuances. But does that help explain why both terms might be in use?
My understanding of many complaints about Blackout/All Clear is that several are based on real factual errors in geography and history. So waving the whole thing off as subjective is almost entirely undermining your own point.
I’m not sure who this is addressed to, but I don’t think either I or Contrarius have waved the whole thing off as subjective. We were contrasting that case, where there was an objective basis for the criticism, with this one, which is about failure of explanation, a subjective matter. (The move from ‘it is an objective fact that this book contains errors’ to ‘it is an objective fact that this book is totally and unquestionably rubbish’ may still be disputed, though.)
DS9 aside because yes I have been mulling my favourite characters since mentioning Gul Dukat last night :blush:
#1, no question, is Rom. #2-5 is a constant, blood-soaked guerrilla-style melee between the two kick-ass women (Kira and Jadzia) and the two suave slimy smexy Cardassians (Dukat and Garak).
The discussion of plot holes reminds me that Roger Ebert sometimes pointed out unquestionable plot holes (such as in a movie in which it turns out that a character is driving a vehicle while at same time is tied up in the back of the vehicle) while other times (it seems to me) he mistook events as being plot holes – for example, in his review of “Iron Man II” (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/iron-man-2-2010) he wrote: “The best CGI sequence in the movie comes at midpoint, when Tony Stark decides to drive his own car in the Monaco Grand Prix, and Ivan Vanko stands fearlessly in the middle of the race, dressed like a kinky gladiator and wielding electric whips that can slice a car in two. He nearly destroys Stark, which is so exciting that we forget to wonder how he knew that Tony was driving his own car. ” It seemed to me that Vanko didn’t know or care that Tony was going to be driving the car in the race – Vanko just knew that Tony would be there to watch the race, and thus be humiliated by seeing his car being destroyed by a man in an armored suit, mere hours or days after Tony had claimed that Tony’s suit was unique (and in addition, that either Tony would stay in the stands, showing himself to be a coward, or that Tony would step forward to fight Vanko and be killed (if Vanko’s suit had been as good as Vanko thought).
@Andrew: “such as in a movie in which it turns out that a character is driving a vehicle while at same time is tied up in the back of the vehicle”
Plot hole or continuity error? And yeah, I saw a couple of the examples like the Iron Man one in Civil War. They seemed like plot holes, but then I thought about it.
Plot hole or continuity error?
If I understand the description of the movie Ebert was talking about, it’s a plot error – one character turns out to have multiple personalities, with one personality being the victim of a menacing killer, whom the killer has tied up in the back of a truck and one personality (the viewers eventually learn) is actually the killer who had been driving the truck.
Contrarius: For me, the handling of gender was only one of many aspects of the book showing us that appearance and social consensus are not always the same things as reality. In this case, it’s playing with gender as a social construct, and societal claims vs. societal realities. This society claims to be gender-neutral and sexually liberated, but it is clearly neither in reality. At one point Mycroft tells us that the mere mention of a gendered pronoun would instantly make members of his culture picture seductions and torrid sex scenes. At another point Mycroft calls a certain character male while someone else calls that same character female. At another point Mycroft calls a character female because of that character’s current occupation while casually describing that character’s beard. And all the major political leaders of Mycroft’s world pretend to be part and parcel of this supposedly egalitarian and genderless society while actually being raised and enculturated by a profoundly gender-differentiated brothel-slash-cult headquarters rife with rigidly enforced gender roles and artificiality.
And my point is that I don’t see anything particularly innovative or clever with that — or that the other things which are done with politics and religion and philosophy and society in the book are particularly cleverly done, either.
Contrarius: “This is multi-layered — many many things going on in plot and character and theme. It makes your brain cells start popping and fizzing with all the ideas and references and complications and interactions. It’s talking about transformation in so many ways, and artifice, and science, and miracle, and pretense vs. reality, and cult of personality vs. meritocracy, and the one thing you would do anything to protect, and what that “anything” might actually entail, and it will sound like an entirely different novel depending on who you talk to about it. And it’s a loving and sardonic homage to the age of Voltaire and de Sade in both style and substance. And I’ve got tons of love for all of the fireworks going off in all directions. Nothing about it is truly straightforward.”
My version of this is “it’s attempting to take on so many things that the result is a disjointed jumble where nothing really gets done well”.
I went back and looked; it’s been 10 months since I read the book and I won’t be slogging through it again. So if you wish to comfort yourself that my descriptions of what I saw as huge problems with the book are “not factual”, and that your opinions of the book’s brilliance are “factual”, go right ahead.
Andrew
High Tension? Yeah it made no sense.
Standback: Specifically as to gender, I just wrote this piece which, indeed, tries to explain why what Palmer does is so interesting. I’d actually love to hear your reaction to it, particularly if it’s the kind of piece you’re looking for.
Yes! That’s exactly the sort of thing I mean! Thank you for that.
I read that piece right after you posted it, and an hour or so later after some thinking, I finally hit on what one of the reasons why I reacted so differently to the book than a lot of other people:
Too Like the Lightning doesn’t punch me in the face. About anything. As you saw earlier, I don’t really care* how other people refer to my gender. I’ve gotten to the point where my identity is for the most part based on my perception of myself; I’ve gotten to a place where I’m happy to be me, and (with rare exceptions) what other people say to, or about, me does not affect my own concept of my identity.
So when Mycroft aggressively misgenders other people, my response is to roll my eyes and think, well, it’s incredibly rude and abusive to disregard people’s own statement about who they are and make up your own for them, but assholes are gonna asshole. It doesn’t push any buttons for me.
I’m very firmly not religious — a state I arrived at after years of thought and discussion, after being raised by a Protestant and going to Sunday School and church every week for 18 years — but I’m perfectly happy for other people to do their thing, so long as they’re not trying to cram it down my throat or get their religious views made into laws that I have to follow. So when the society tells its citizens that they are absolutely not allowed to have religion, my response to that is, “Well, good luck with that, because religious people are gonna religion” (and look, here they are in the book covertly doing exactly that). It doesn’t push any buttons for me.
Likewise, when it comes to sex, I greatly approve of it, in whichever flavors one prefers, as long as it’s fully consensual, and does not involve the grooming or violation of children. So the book’s treatment of sexual themes does not bother me, either. People with sexual desires are gonna sex. It doesn’t push any buttons for me.
What I saw in the book was a hugely dysfunctional and corrupt society which — given the hugely dysfunctional and corrupt society we’re currently in — wasn’t particularly remarkable to me; it’s just a patchwork quilt of different ideas about societal constructs from various places, stitched together into one thing, and coming up with essentially the same result from the opposite direction.
And there are quite a number of really interesting ideas in the book, such as the instant free transport, and Bridger. But it turns out that those ideas are really just window-dressing for the characters — most of whom are not particularly well-developed as their own three-dimensional characters.
So: 1) what I perceive to be worldbuilding which is inconsistent and illogical within itself, 2) a failure to really do anything with a lot of the interesting ideas presented in the book, 3) poor character development of all but one or two main characters, 4) a plot which isn’t really a plot, it’s just a reporting of a sequence of events and people’s actions and reactions, 5) a lack of what I would consider innovative or thought-provoking treatments of the story’s issues (and yes, I realize that a lot of people disagree with me about that). This is why this book doesn’t really do anything for me: these are failures of the things which make books interesting and enjoyable for me.
Having said that, Standback, I found your essay hugely interesting and thought-provoking, and would be delighted to read more such pieces.
* and I am very cognizant that this is a privilege many other people don’t have
Andrew: If I understand the description of the movie Ebert was talking about, it’s a plot error – one character turns out to have multiple personalities, with one personality being the victim of a menacing killer, whom the killer has tied up in the back of a truck and one personality (the viewers eventually learn) is actually the killer who had been driving the truck.
Identity, with John Cusack, had some of those same issues. I felt pretty cheated at the ending in that movie.
The thing that amuses me is that in a sufficiently SFnal setting, a writer could actually pull that off.
Michael O’Donnell: Thanks very much for the link to that 1993 Doctor Who special, which I hadn’t seen and which had lots of entertaining bits.
@Hampus —
Perhaps in many instances, but not so much in the context of this particular discussion. In the interests of length I did not provide more context, but the complaint in this case was that 10 years old was too young for a boy to be raping anyone, and thus the author was at fault for writing a 10-year-old as a rapist. Except, of course, that the author never actually did any such thing.
@Andrew —
The term “Plot Hole” can’t be used for any failure to explain things, though — only when such lack of explanation leaves the impression of a plot inconsistency.
Right. I totally agree with you here.
@JJ —
And as I’ve pointed out several times now, I’ve got no issue with people who bounce off books for whatever reason. But the point you are making now is very different than your initial and still unsupported claim about plot holes “as big as the Grand Canyon.”
@JJ Reading reviews, one point I’m finding in disagreement with reviewers is that the world building in Too Like the Lightning is deep and/or strong. I think you are right, it is sort of thin: lots of ideas and systems but no strong sense of how that society would actually be.
I also suspect it is deliberate.
@Camestros —
I noticed while reading that we never get to see how “regular people” live. We are shown the “aristocracy” and the “slaves” — and very little in between. But, then again, that’s who Palmer was interested in showing us.
Question that I don’t know the answer to: did Voltaire talk much about the “common man”? Did de Sade? Diderot? Or did they focus on the top and bottom of society as well?
Another question that I don’t know the answer to: is Palmer telling us that all this faffing about with ideas of gender and religion and power are essentially nonsense that only aristocrats would waste time worrying about? That the masses have more important things to do?