Ryan's comments (member since Jan 09, 2009)

Ryan's comments from the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.

There've been several nominations that haven't explained the way the book's magic system works. Little help?

Sabriel by Garth Nix employs free magic versus charter magic. The former is natural, wild, and unpredictable; the latter is structured and symbol-based, conjured by marks or a series of marks that represent anything and everything and can be carved or written or imprinted. The main character uses bells of various tones set with the marks to control or influence the dead.

Patrick Rotfuss' The Name of the Wind employs "sympathy," for which the user has to create a mental connection between two things: Think drawing on a smaller heat source to create a larger fire, or breaking a thin splinter to snap the string on a musical instrument several feet away.

I had many revelatory moments as I was reading, most notably the ghoul/Bandar-Log parallel, and the Sleer similarity to the ancient snake Mowgli meets underground when he finds a lost treasure.
If only there were a Riki-Tiki-Tavi story in The Graveyard Book ...

I love it for the reason Ray Bradbury is my favorite author: His prose is essentially poetry. Even if the plot of a particular short story of his doesn't capture me, the language does.

I grew up on Rudyard Kipling's jungle stories, and was delighted to find the characters, plot points, settings, and more transmuted in The Graveyard Book. What did you think of Neil Gaiman changing beasts into ghosts and ghouls? What similarities did you recognize between the two endeavors? What differences?

I took it to be one of those words an English speaker such as myself can only get an impression of, such as ennui or schadenfreude. I mostly get what they mean--a sort of gray malaise and boredom, and pleasure at the misfortune of others, respectively--but suspect that, having not been raised French or German, I'll never truly understand the full meaning of the words.

Likewise, I took shifgrethor to mean all that LeGuin defined it as and interpreted it as best I could in context, but never felt pressed to fully understand it. I suspect no one from outside the culture (including us readers in the real world) would fully get it, though I agree with Carlos that it has some Eastern overtones.

My wife, a child development specialist to whom I was just reading some of these comments, pointed out that even when children play with toys typically considered to be aimed at the opposite gender, they play with them differently. In other words, girls made orderly, rule-oriented games with trucks as opposed to crashing them. Boys made weapons out of baby dolls (which is really funny to watch, she said). I've noticed that even when boys play with girls on stereotypical girls' terms, they'll only do so for a limited time before having an "oh no!" moment--the family car flies off a cliff or giant spiders attack.

There are obviously exceptions (as a boy, for instance, I never played any sports and wrote short stories about unicorns), and a lot of gender norms are surely societal constructs, but the genetic traits that eventually physiologically lead girls into motherhood (at least potentially) influence their play when younger and social interactions when older. I think that goes beyond societal expectations.

Watching my wife grow through two pregnancies--and seeing the resulting physical and emotional changes wrought by fluctuating hormones--has been a great object lesson. Her nesting instinct was not based on any societal expectations, but it measurably kicked in. (She thinks that's an understatement.)

Sandi wrote: "I find it interesting how often discussions of gender-neutrality seek to make men less masculine.

That does seem to be the case. My wife worked in an early-childhood development center that emphasized gender neutrality and met a boy being raised "gender neutral" by two mothers. He had long, never-cut hair and was dressed in pastel purples and pinks. To my admittedly biased eye, such choices don't reveal neutrality. Maybe a shaved head and clothes that come in shades of oranges and browns?

He was thrilled one day, by the way, when he figured out he was a boy with help from another boy in the program. He announced to everyone, "I'm a boy! I'm a boy!" His moms weren't too pleased.

Kernos wrote: "In girls menarche is often used as coming of age, an easily defined event. There is no similar event that can be used for boys."

I've often lamented the fact that there seem to be no male-centered rites of passage, at least in modern Western culture. The lack of even a token line to cross sort of extends the length a male's "accepted" immaturity, I think, and at least creates a sociological separation between the sexes, regardless of gender roles.

I don't think, however, that less attention paid to gender would ultimately change physiology in the long haul--unless we're talking purely cosmetic features like fashionable hair or fingernail length. Even then, media-publicized forays into universalizing this type of behavior have kept a division clear.

Remember: Men who got pedicures or waxes or other "typically female" treatments were called "metrosexuals." They had to be labeled as men doing something un-manly--or at least something that fell under a new category of manly. Society didn't just say, "Yes, people in general, regardless of sex or gender, now act the same in the beauty department." It was more, "Some men act more like women now, but they're still men. They're just doing woman-like things, so they get a label that explains their somewhat feminine proclivities but still keeps them squarely in the man camp."

But even as clear polish coats the nails of men and women alike, the fundamental aspects of reproduction won't change--even with artificial insemination, as Greyweather mentioned. There's still one sex providing the xy and one providing the xx. And if society can't examine gender-neutral beauty care without throwing out front-page headlines to dissect the phenomenon as something still uniquely gender based, it's not going to nudge future generations toward a receding division of gender, either.

I have to admit that I'd never even heard of this book until it came up here, and I'm no stranger to sci-fi, classic or otherwise. At least I thought I wasn't. From just a few chapters in, I can see why TLHOD could be considered a classic, at least in sci-fi circles.

I'd like to know what both critics had to say to back up their respective points. Are the "classic" and "dull" quotes pulled from larger critiques?

I remember thinking How Much for Just the Planet? was hilarious when I was younger. Warning: It's slapstick, but it's the most effective slapstick I've ever seen in print.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. I've read excerpts, and it seems intriguing from both a literary and sci-fi perspective.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut would be my pick if the group wants to read him, though I'm more partial to Breakfast of Champions (which is only nominally sci-fi, I suppose).

And not to dangle too many threads, but what would readers consider something like The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami? It's hard to pin down in any one genre, but it certainly has sci-fi themes.

It's not sci-fi, but I considered Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly to be fantasy. I didn't believe five-sixths of his tales of sordid food-related affairs, and his writing was packed with too much ridiculous alpha-male posing and faux self-deprecation. Plus, it was riddled with typos. Ugh.

To snag some other threads: I got stuck halfway through The Host , thought The Name of the Wind was probably the best book I read last year (twice), enjoyed The Road (even if the Pulitzer committee plays favorites to grammar-busters and format-flaunters: see The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), and have been meaning to start something by George R. R. Martin, but am holding out until I find a copy of the first book in the Wild Cards series he edited.

Like Sandi, I've only read one Iain M. Banks book. Look to Windward was given to me by a former teacher some years ago.

It didn't turn out to be my favorite sci-fi novel ever, but I was very intrigued by many of the subplots and characters surrounding the commemoration of a long-ago double-sun-destroying battle, the light of which is just now reaching a distant Culture world. There was also some seriously imaginative megafauna and creative depictions of arts and recreation in a decadent, futuristic society.

Overall, I enjoyed it--but since I don't consider myself a "serious Iain M. Banks fan," I wouldn't say I'm speaking with any kind of authority about the body of his work, early or late.

Ray Bradbury is my all-time favorite author, and I love all of his collections. Some of my favorites of his are:
"Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds"
"The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse"
"The Finnegan" (about a door-obsessed Sherlock Holmes-type detective and a giant spider)

Other stories that have affected me are:
"Sunbird," by Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
"The Upper Berth," by F. Marion Crawford (it terrified me when I found it in an Alfred Hitchcock collection as a young reader)
"Ado," by Connie Willis, read years ago in Isaac Asimov's Sf-Lite
"Your Story," by Rick DeMarinis

Though not short story collections per se, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics are wonderful reads, particularly "Eusapia" in the former and "The Distance of the Moon" and "The Spiral" in the latter.

To Carly (message 56): "The Rocking Horse Winner" was written by D.H. Lawrence.