I’ve been very, very restrained this week, which I suppose makes up for other weeks! Just one ARC, The Killing Kind, and one issue of a comic.
See, Mum? Lisa? This is proof I am starving for lack of books.
Don’t look at me like that.
Only Forward, Michael Marshall Smith
Review from April 23rd, 2013
Oh — my — god. When I started reading this book I expected it to keep up the fairly light tone of the early chapters. Then it fucked with my heart bad. Don’t believe reviews saying it makes no sense: it makes perfect sense, in the end, as long as you stop holding onto normal logic and start applying some dream logic. The narrator is unreliable, yeah, and he has attitude, and he knows he’s telling a story, so there are bits that some people find irritating, like the way he keeps saying he’ll tell us more about [whatever] later, if it’s relevant. And I can understand that, but for me it’s all part of who the narrator is.
I love the world built up here. The different neighbourhoods, the cats, the whys and wherefores of The City. I love the writing, because so much of it is painfully on the nose about trauma, about the demons we’re capable of dreaming up. I love all of this more than I love the characters, really: I love it for what it has to say about trauma, about the way we think.
It’s hard to talk about it without any spoilers, really. All I can say is that it comes together in the end, and you understand things in a heartbreaking rush, and it really is good. Weird, yes. But very good.
Rating: 5/5
Valour & Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal
These books seem to be just perfect for my brain at the moment. I read this on the train, more or less in one gulp. You’ve got to love that one of the most important threads of the story is the love between Vincent and Jane, and how it gets them through everything, no matter what. And despite how far their acts of derring-do have come from their Austen-esque beginnings in Shades of Milk and Honey, the development is clear. This time, the trouble they get into grows out of everything before (rather than being a whole new problem), which makes it tidier.
Likewise, their personal relationship grows out of everything that’s gone before; Jane’s miscarriage, Vincent’s time in captivity, the effects that had on them. They trust each other more now, and they’re readier to work through problems than despair. (Which is not to say Vincent doesn’t have some black moods in this novel. He does, in a way that very much reflects on the way some men even now feel less when their wives are the ones bringing in the money.)
I think really the blurb on the back gave a little too much away; knowing, for example, that they’re victims of ‘an elaborate heist’, I immediately began to suspect where the heist began and who was involved. But it doesn’t give away the motive, fortunately, nor what Vincent and Jane end up doing to fix the situation.
It’s a lot of fun, as I’d expected, and I enjoyed the inclusion of Lord Byron as well.
Rating: 4/5
The Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley
Received to review via Netgalley
It took me long enough to get round to this one, I know. Props to Ryan from SpecFic Junkie for poking and prodding me to finally get round to reading Kameron Hurley’s fiction. I wasn’t sure if I would enjoy it, because I had read the start of both this and God’s War before, and bounced off. That seems to have been a timing/mood thing, because I found a lot to fascinate me this time. Hurley can really do weird, in ways that come to feel more organic than, say, China Miéville’s brand of weird. I can never forget that’s weird. Reading The Mirror Empire, carnivorous plants and mirror worlds and all the other details quickly settled into feeling normal for the reality I inhabited while reading the book. It was never not fascinating, but I learnt the rules, and I didn’t feel like bizarre things were there just to be bizarre. It was part of building a whole world with a coherent mythology.
The contradictions that other reviews I’ve seen have mentioned… well, I didn’t notice them. To me, the whole concept of the mirror worlds came together well. Likewise, the stuff people accuse Hurley of putting in just to be shocking. Like, the ataisa, people who are neither male nor female but somewhere in a grey area. That’s not new in speculative fiction at all, and it’s baffling when people say it is. It isn’t even new in the real world for people to feel that way. What’s shocking and new is apparently just the fact that Hurley includes them, matter of factly, and it doesn’t have to be plot-relevant. I’d love to know more about Taigan and why she is the way she is (I use ‘she’ because that’s how she identifies at the end of the book), particularly the fact that unlike other ataisa, her transformation is physical. But it doesn’t have to be plot relevant: it’s character relevant, it adds another layer to the world. Why not?
There’s also polyamory, queer relationships, female-led societies and relationships. None of that is shocking — or rather, if it is, then you’re living your life with blinkers on.
I did struggle with the rape elements in this story. The degree to which particular characters consent or not, whether we’re meant to see one character in particular as heroic. In the end, I felt that Zezili — for example — was a character with nuance; her relationship with Anahva was unequal, and it didn’t seem to matter whether he gave consent or not, to her. But I didn’t see that as being excused by the story. It was a part of the character, like killing innocents, like opposing the Big Bad of the book. Good and bad in one person, and not always distinguishable.
As for the complaint about a lack of strong male characters… uh, Taigan? Roh? Ahkio? Oh, I see, your problem is that they aren’t all traditionally strong (or male all the time, in Taigan’s case). But it’s nothing like the straight flip that people are making out: the female characters aren’t all one brand of strong, either.
In the end, I enjoyed this a lot. It does feel a little too dark for me at times, but there’s a lot to enjoy too; loads of world-building, interesting characters and relationships, etc. I’m looking forward to the next book, and to going back to God’s War.
Rating: 4/5
Darwin’s Lost World, Martin Brasier
When I picked this up, I didn’t really register that I’d been disappointed by one of the author’s other books. Good thing it was a library book, because though the topic of the most ancient remains of life is fascinating, Brasier’s account jumps around geologically and logically. There’s no straight progression from idea to idea, era to era, area to area. I kept losing track of where a fossil was and how old it was thought to be, and getting distracted by Brasier’s anecdotes (almost boasting) about places he’d been looking for fossils.
Also, I don’t know if Brasier is English or Welsh or what, but my teeth started slowly grinding when he brought in Arthurian analogies. Arthur never looked for the grail, never. It’s the same issue with basic facts that I found in Secret Chambers when he repeated common apocryphal stories as fact, except even more personally annoying because this is Arthur and I spent most of my degree studying Arthur as deeply as Brasier studies fossils. It’s an idiosyncratic reaction, I know, but it was still annoying. The Arthurian stuff felt weird, shoehorned in, especially when Brasier was doing research for Oxford University in Scotland. I could understand it more if he was a fellow of a Welsh university or something.
Rating: 2/5
This week’s theme is books you’d like to see as movies/tv shows. The proviso here is that I would want appropriate casting, e.g. not a white man for Ged or Patriot.
Gaah, gimme them. Nowww.
As I selected the books for this list, I’d finished reading 17 of the 20 books I picked for my May TBR, plus 5 wildcards. And here I was thinking that I suck at to read lists. Clearly I just need to give myself a bit of leeway and public accountability.
That being said, here we go! I’ve already kind of started on this, as of May 31st, because I was feeling just a bit too constrained by my May list.
ARCs
Library
Owned
Rereads (including books counting as owned-unread because of ebook duplicates)
Catching up (from last month’s TBR)
Wildcards
As before, graphic novels don’t count, because I tend to read them in one sitting anyway. If I finish fifteen of the non-wildcard books and I’ve run out of wildcards, I’ll probably let myself have some more. I didn’t last month, but that’s because I reached 15/20 quite near the end of the month. With a long trip to Belgium and then to Canada in my future for June, maybe I’ll read more.
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Read this for the Cardiff SF/F book club! I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, since it’s in the SF Masterworks list — and deservedly so, I think. Some of the attitudes to the female characters grossed me out, and there is a casual rape joke thrown in — basically a recurring theme is that it’s a woman’s job to keep the men on her team from going nuts. By having sex with them. Still, the main female character does have an arc of her own through the story which is all tied up with her character and everything else in the book; we’re very much given the impression that all of it is happening because of her.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, really: the idea of the Ringworld, the idea of breeding a population for luck (and the exploration of the effects that would have), the aliens’ interactions with one another… There’s a lot of background here that the book uses, without flinging it all at you at once. The style is pretty immersive: you’re right in there with the main character, using the technology of his world, etc. The science is mostly in the background; I gather this was intended to be hard-SF and then gets mocked for some issues, but that isn’t obtrusive for a layperson at all.
It’s also pretty readable, partly because the science is mostly kept in the background, partly because the set-up is interesting enough to make up for frustrations with the characters (and even then, their interactions are interesting, and it’s not as if they don’t call each other on their bullshit).
Given all that, I’m not all that enthused about reading more of Niven’s work. It’s nice to read the classics sometimes, but I tend to prefer character-driven stories, with human motives driving it; this was definitely not that, as many of the things that happened were ginormous coincidences that only happened for plot reasons. People didn’t have much free will of their own, this way.
For taking an idea and following it logically through, I originally gave this four stars, but after discussion with the SF/F group, I decided to revise it down. Louis is basically a Sad Puppy; this is the kind of fiction the puppies laud, and a lot of it doesn’t sit well with me. It got past my defences because when I read something from the 70s, I automatically give it an of its time tag in my head. Which is a bit silly when it’s being republished in the Masterworks series now as still relevant. Still, the ideas themselves and the consistency of them worked for me, and it was in no way a chore to read (unlike, say, the sequels to Dune, sigh).
Rating: 3/5
Well, both the reading and the posting for my month of reading only female authored books are done. I also didn’t buy books by men or borrow books by men from the library during the month, and made sure all my ‘Flashback Friday’ posts were of books by female authors. Did I notice a change? Well, no, not really. Once or twice I had to remind myself, and put off reading something or other until the month was over. I don’t think I’d want to extend the month any longer; I read a lot of female authors anyway, and there’s so much worthwhile stuff out there that isn’t written by women.
Still, it was interesting. Browsing the shelves at Caerphilly Library, realising that I had to go for three shelves in the SF&F section until I found a female author; looking for books about science written by women and finding them thin on the ground; noticing my own dismissal of certain genres (paranormal romance, for example) because I just assume they’re all the same. Even though I’ve read some and really enjoyed them.
It wasn’t a struggle to read female authors only for a month, but the change in focus was interesting. I might do it with other groups in future.
What about you? Did you notice that I was only posting reviews of books by female authors in May?
Peacemaker, Marianne de Pierres
Received to review via Netgalley
I’ve been meaning to read something by Marianne de Pierres for ages. I don’t know if this was a good place to start, but I usually enjoy Angry Robot books; they usually have interesting ideas, and they’re quick reads. And I got this on Netgalley before I cut down my requesting habits, so I have finally, finally got round to reading it. And I enjoyed it! It keeps up a hell of a pace, there’s a bunch of interesting mysteries (some characters are mysteries in themselves, there’s a larger mystery which causes all the mayhem, and there’s an ongoing question yet to be solved, presumably awaiting further books), etc.
In some cases, it felt a little too scattered, waiting for something to pull it all together: why is Heart so involved in Virgin’s life? Why does Hamish care? How much does any given character know about what’s going on? And some things felt a little too convenient/easy. The park is easy to picture, but other areas less so: Virgin doesn’t spend nearly as much time describing anywhere but the park, which makes sense with her character, but still. The near-future setting kept throwing me: where exactly is the technology in relation to ours? Etc.
Overall, it’s fun. A bit Western-y, a bit urban fantasy, a bit near-future spec-fic. There’s a pretty diverse cast of characters, and nearly all of them have a role to play — there’s no, or at least few, throwaway characters who are just there to prop up a bit of the plot.
Rating: 3/5