Marie Brennan's Blog, page 169

Books read, February 2014 (and some of January, too)

I remembered two of the books I read in January. A part of me is convinced that the reason I forgot to record them in the first place is because one of them is the book I thought would never end.

Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson. Can you believe I finished Quicksilver? I’m not sure I do. (I actually thought I had a hundred pages to go when I unexpectedly hit the end, because I didn’t realize there was a dramatis personae in the back, and also because the ebook version puts every footnote on a separate page.)

I don’t know what to say about this novel. I’m not even sure it’s really a novel. It is a giant pile of words and characters and events and places and historical tidbits, and I found much of it highly amusing. It wanders vaguely in the direction of several different things that might, in the hands of a different writer, be a plot. Possibly once I’ve read the other two books, I will be able to find something more like a shape to it. But I will need to take a break before I do that. In the meanwhile, the most useful thing I can find to say is that this reminds me a great deal of the middle bit of Snow Crash, where the plot slams to a halt while Hiro and the Librarian talk about neurolinguistics and Sumerian mythology. If you find the subject matter interesting, you may enjoy this book. If not, you will probably be very frustrated.

Twinmaker, Sean Williams. YA SF about a future where d-mat technology allows for anything you need to be fabricated on demand, and also for teleportation — you can go from booth to booth by letting it dematerialize your body and make you a new one at your destination. I saw one plot twist coming, but that’s fine; I spent much of the book trying to guess what was going on with the rest of the plot. I think the ultimate answer was less satisfying to me than some of the possibilities I’d thought of, but it wasn’t bad. It resolves the plot, but in a way that makes it clear there is at least one sequel coming, because boy howdy do the characters have new problems.

VotB, Marie Brennan. My own books get recorded, but don’t count. This was for revision purposes.

A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E. Schwab. Provided by the editor for blurbing purposes, so not available yet. Multiverse setup where the only point of commonality between the worlds is that they all have a city named London; the main protagonist, Kell, is from what he dubs Red London, in a world where magic is common. He is one of the few remaining people who’s able to move between the cities after Black London was consumed by magic and walled off for the safety of the others, leaving White London starving for magic and Grey London (which is our world, in the Victorian period) almost completely bereft of it. I don’t know if this is the first book in a series, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I did enjoy it; now I just need to figure out how to turn that enjoyment into a blurb.

Untold, Sarah Rees Brennan. Second in the Lynburn Legacy, a YA Gothic urban fantasy series. (“Gothic” in the sense of “return of the repressed,” not “mopey teenagers in black nail polish.”) This one features a lot of the fallibility of adults; the protagonist gets a front-row view of the ways in which grown-ups have their own hangups and flaws that cause them to make decisions every bit as stupid as the ones which teenagers fall victim to. As befits the middle book of a trilogy, it ends on a note of OH MY GOD WE’RE SO SCREWED. Good news is, the third one is out in September, so you won’t have to wait long to find out what the characters do to get themselves out of the very deep hole they’re in.

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card. Wound up watching the movie at my brother’s house, which put me in a mood to re-read the book. (Verdict on the movie: okay, but I think they watered down some of the impact it could have had in places, and also I now understand exactly how useful montages are, because this film really needed one or two and didn’t have ‘em.)

It is still a complicated book about which you can have many arguments. It is also still a very engaging read that makes me wish Card hadn’t descended into such a morass of behavior abhorrent to me.

Shield and Crocus, Michael R. Underwood. Provided by the author for blurbing purposes. Do you like superheroes? Do you like the New Weird? Do you consider these two great tastes that would taste great together, if only somebody had thought to combine them? This is the book for you! It is also less squidgy (technical term) than most New Weird, so if you like the idea of a city that exists within the skeleton of a fallen titan ruled over by a set of tyrants ranging from a giant robot to a corporate gang lord to a grinning lunatic, but are worried that it’ll be too grotesque for you to enjoy, fear not. Grotesquerie puts me off most New Weird stuff, but I found this one eminently readable.

Finding Nouf, Zoe Ferraris. Recommended by the Mris. First in a series of non-speculative mysteries set in Saudi Arabia, written by an American woman who married into a Saudi family and lived there for some time. I have said before that the Regency is the natural home of the romance novel, because there are compelling social reasons why the characters can’t solve all their problems by having a nice sensible conversation; it turns out that Saudi Arabia offers similar virtues for the mystery novel. When the investigator can’t question half the relevant people because they’re women and he isn’t related to them, you can get a lot of mileage out of a plot that would be resolved much more easily in the U.S.

I can’t say for certain that Ferraris is accurately depicting the mentality of a traditional Saudi man, because of course she is neither Saudi nor a man. But presuming that her experience means she’s got a good handle on the type . . . my god, do I feel bad for Nayir in this book. Katya too, since of course she’s the one who’s most obviously bound by Saudi restrictions, but also Nayir, in that “patriarchy hurts everybody” kind of way. He spends most of the book absolutely marinating in anxiety over every single interaction he has with a woman, berating himself for staring too long at her hands or whatever, and it very vividly illustrates why restricting interactions between men and women for fear of sexual impropriety pretty much guarantees that sexual impropriety will be happening right, left, and center.

City of Veils, Zoe Ferraris. Second book in the series, and it should tell you something that not only did I read both of these in the last few days of the month, but the third one will be the first item in the post for March. Ferraris’ prose gets more complex here, but I ended up being a little annoyed by the amount of focus given to Miriam, the American woman in Saudi Arabia. It’s easy for me to empathize with the character who hasn’t grown up in that milieu and finds it utterly frustrating/abhorrent/terrifying; I’d rather spend time in Katya’s and Nayir’s points of view, thinking about how Saudi characters perceive the situation and what they do to challenge it. Still and all: good book, tore through it in about a day flat, recommended if you like mysteries in a context that is probably less familiar to you.

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Supernatural Re-Watch: “Shadow” and payoff

“Shadow” is the sixteenth episode of Season 1, and it is the point at which I realized Eric Kripke had learned some valuable lessons from the mistakes of The X-Files.

Finding John Winchester is the issue that set the characters in motion, that put Sam and Dean on the road together. As I said to k8 and S when we first watched the show, if this had been The X-Files, five years later they would still be looking for their dad, having found seven different explanations for his disappearance along the way, each less satisfying than the last. (I might be just a wee bit annoyed by the whole Samantha-and-Mulder thing.) But Kripke doesn’t try to spin it out forever: Sam and Dean go looking for John, and they find him. Before the first season is even done.

Heck, the writers don’t even wait until the sixteenth episode to start changing the game. The natural assumption on the part of the viewer is that John is dead, or will be by the time his sons track him down, but we’re barely four episodes in before we get a clue that he’s still alive; I forgot to record this, but I think it’s in “Phantom Traveler” that Dean finds out John’s outgoing voicemail message has changed, telling people to call his son for help. John himself shows up at the end of “Home,” sitting in Missouri’s house, though it’s staged in such a fashion as to leave open the possibility that he’s actually a ghost. He calls his sons at the end of the very next episode, “Asylum” — which is, not coincidentally, the last one before the mid-season break, making for a nice little cliffhanger. And then, rather than continuing to tease the audience with hints and near-misses and brief conversations, the writers take that promise and deliver on it: in “Shadow,” John reunites with his sons.

This is what Kripke got right, and for my money, it’s the core of what makes Supernatural a compelling show. He doesn’t try to milk his starting mysteries for all eternity; he hangs guns on the mantel and then fires them. Okay, we don’t really get an explanation for what happened to John — just that he was looking for a way to deal with the yellow-eyed demon, which doesn’t actually explain why he was MIA for so long that Dean had to recruit Sam to help look for him. But that mid-term goal on the brothers’ to-do list gets checked off. So does the long-term goal, though not quite as soon; the yellow-eyed demon is not the antagonist they’re fighting at the end of S5. Kripke trusts himself and his audience enough to believe that the answers to the starting questions will generate new questions in turn. And so step by step, the plot builds to something bigger than it was before.

Not everybody can manage this trick. I walked away from Alias at the end of S2 because Abrams failed at this maneuver. (Incoming spoilers.) I thought the core of the show was the conflict with SD6, so when that organization got wiped out halfway through S2, I felt like the story was over. The “revelation” that it was actually about the Rambaldi artifacts came across as a bait-and-switch, rather than a cool evolution of what had come before. I had similar problems with Fringe, though to a lesser degree. In Kripke’s case, I think it helps that he layers his conflicts; the short-term goals pay off every episode, more or less, while this particular mid-term goal stretched for two thirds of a season, and the long-term goal doesn’t get resolved until (if memory serves) the end of S2. Finding John doesn’t mean the story loses momentum, because there are other things to carry it forward while the new goals develop.

I think this is a vital lesson for any kind of serial work, whether it’s a TV show, a comic book, a novel series, or anything else. Running things in parallel lets you pay off various elements as you go, and the payoff is vital for a satisfying story. It allows the characters to achieve meaningful victories, instead of either spinning their wheels or accomplishing something that ends up feeling unimportant. (Interesting twist: it isn’t actually a victory when Sam and Dean find John. Technically their father is the one who finds them, rather than the other way around, and also their reunion turns out to be exactly what the bad guys want.)

You have to trust yourself, and trust your audience. Your ideas don’t get cooler by you holding onto them forever. Let them follow their course, and lay the groundwork for something bigger and better.

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Posting makes the Internet go ’round

I’m not doing a giant blog tour like last year, but I have contrived to be in a few places around the Internet recently:

1) On the Tor/Forge blog, These Are a Few of My Favorite Dragons. Can you guess which ones I picked? (Before you click on the link to see, of course.)

2) On Tor.com — not to be confused with the Tor/Forge blog — I participated in a series called “That Was Awesome! Writers on Writing.” The point of the series is to talk about awesome moments in other people’s books, perfect little twists or amazing scenes that just blew you away. Head on over to see what I chose. (Many of you, I think, will not be surprised in the slightest . . . .)

3) On Lawrence M. Schoen’s site, another post series, this one with the ominous title of “Eating Authors,” and the much less ominous theme of “writers talk about the fabulous meals they’ve had.” I chose to discuss the kaiseki meal Starlady took us to in Kyoto. Eight tiny courses of phenomenally good Japanese food, enough to make a gourmand weep for joy.

4) Okay, this one’s old, but I realized I’d forgotten to link to it when it first went up: Timing is the bane of existence” at SFNovelists. On the unexpected pitfalls of figuring out, not what will happen in your book, but when it will happen.

5) Not a link, but a reminder: I’ll be at FOGcon this weekend, and at Borderlands Books on Sunday at 7 p.m. I hope to see one or more of you there!

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A Year in Pictures – Sravanabelagola Bell

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The main structure at Sravanabelagola centers on an enormous statue of Gommateshvara Bahubali, which stands in a courtyard that frankly seems too small for it. The inner edge of the portico ringing that space is surmounted by a series of splendid carvings, and I quite liked this angle, which silhouettes the dark bell against the warm colors of the stone.

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A Year in Pictures – Apostle in Kraków

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This is one of several statues of the Apostles of Jesus outside the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul in Kraków. We happened to wander by it around sunset, when the light on the front was warm and lovely. And this fellow amused me because he seems to be saying, “C’mon, guys. You can trust me!”

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Supernatural Re-Watch: “Nightmare” and seeding metaplot

For the record, I will talk about things other than Supernatural pretty soon. It’s just that I got some way into Season 1 before deciding to make a blog series about this, which means I have a backlog of things to say. And I don’t want to get too far ahead in my watching from where I am in posting.

“Nightmare” is the first real forward progress we get on the long-term metaplot, by which I mean the question of what happened to Mary Winchester and why. In this ep we meet Max, a teenager with telekinetic powers, whose mother died in a suspiciously familiar fashion.

In retrospect, “Nightmare” feels a bit like a red herring. Max is real enough, of course, and although we don’t get an explanation for what’s up with him (and with Sam) yet, he is the first clue that the metaplot is bigger than it initially looked. This isn’t just about one family’s quest for revenge; there’s something else going on, and they’re just a piece of a larger picture. But the specifics kind of come across as misdirection. Maybe it’s just me and the kind of people I was watching the show with, but at the time, we poured a lot of energy into trying to guess the significance of how Mary, Jessica, and Max’s own mother died. Pinned to the ceiling, bursting into flame — Mary and Jess both had a line of blood on their abdomens, suggesting they’d been cut open; was it meant to hint that they’d been pregnant, or was the stain too high for that? It’s such a weirdly specific way for them to be killed, it seemed like it had to have some kind of meaning.

But it didn’t, not really. Unless there’s something major I’m forgetting from later on, the only meaning behind the method is that it’s something so specific, it can’t possibly be mistaken for coincidence. If Max’s mother had simply died in a fire, the connection between him and Sam would be tenuous at best. Okay, they both lost their mothers and they both have weird powers. That’s no guarantee the same creature is responsible. You need the manner of their deaths to be idiosyncratic, to make the connection unquestionable.

Presuming I’m right about the chain of reasoning, then I see why Kripke did it that way, and off the cuff I can’t think of an easier way to establish the connection clearly enough. Still, it feels like a suboptimal approach to me, because it places so much importance on a set of details that are, in their own right, essentially meaningless. (The way to improve it, I suppose, would be to keep the specificity but make the details meaningful. I don’t have any good suggestions as to how that might be done, though.)

Anyway, you’ve got an older teen with telekinesis, and Sam in his early twenties with visions of the future. The latter is a useful plot device for one of the recurring questions of the series, namely, “why are the Winchesters in this town and how did they find out about the problems here?” Scouring the internet for news of the weird only gets you so far, after all, and if they had too many repeat customers calling them up, you would start to question how good they are at their jobs. If memory serves, Sam only gets visions about stuff related to the yellow-eyed demon and his plans, but that’s still helpful on a basic narrative level.

(I can’t remember how long it takes for the telekinesis to rear its head again, or if it even does. I know Sam eventually kills demons with his mind or something, but him getting the door open has stuck in my memory as an ability of convenience that mostly doesn’t recur. I could be wrong about that, though.)

I sort of wish the show had done a little more with the notion that Sam, in manifesting this precognitive ability, has marked himself as Other in a way that they’re used to treating as a threat. True, you’ve had Missouri show up by now, so it’s clear that psychics aren’t automatically assumed to be monsters — but in that case, maybe the script shouldn’t have ever suggested that Sam’s ability is potentially a problem. I want them to either worry about it more, or not at all. Worrying about it only a little feels half-hearted.

It’s worth noting that “Nightmare” is the 14th episode of Season 1. Networks apparently make a frequent habit of ordering 13 episodes to start, and then green-lighting the “back nine” if they like how things are going. I would not be surprised to hear that it was a deliberate decision to postpone any big metaplot development until they knew the show would continue. I remember hearing that the WB was kind of anti-metaplot at that point; they wanted episodic shows, the sort where viewers could start watching at any point and not feel lost. While you can see the logic behind that, it’s also counterproductive in a way, because there’s less motivation to tune in every week. After all, you won’t miss anything if you miss an episode, right? (Exhibit A: Smallville, the show where nothing ever seemed to have lasting consequences. Their approach is a large part of why I never invested in the story very heavily.) That mentality probably accounts for a lot of Supernatural‘s structure, the episodic framework with metaplot woven carefully through it. The former satisfied the WB, while the latter helped create the fan investment that has carried the show into a tenth season. I suspect there is a lesson to be learned from that.

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A Year in Pictures – Interior of the Hagia Sophia

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The Hagia Sophia is unfortunately not in the best of condition, and when we were there, fully a quarter of the interior was filled with scaffolding as they worked to conserve and restore the site. Still, I was able to get this shot of the medallions that ringed the chamber, each bearing an Arabic inscription; you can also make out some of the other decorative elements.

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More reasons to hate Google Hangouts

Dear Google,

I’m so glad you decided to link all of my settings to my Google account, rather than to device on which I’m using that account. Because of your decision, I don’t get to say that I would like chat notifications on my tablet, but not on my phone. I either get notifications in both places, or in neither. This is perfect! I get to choose between never seeing chat messages unless I’m on my laptop (where I use Pidgin, a wonderful program that does all the things Hangouts won’t), or having my phone pester me with pinging and buzzing every single time somebody sends me a chat message. Which is fabulous when I’m, y’know, in a public place.

This is such a brilliant move on your part. Even better than that time you decided to take away the nice Talk app and replace it with Hangouts, where I don’t get to see whether somebody’s status is Active or Away or Do Not Disturb. I just love having companies strip away utility and force me into some marketer’s pre-determined idea of how I’m going to use the program, rather than the way I was using the program. You’re doing a bang-up job of understanding your audience; if you didn’t have such a firm grasp of what we wanted, you wouldn’t be so successful at giving us the exact opposite.

No love,

Me

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Five Things Make a Post That Is Not About Supernatural

1) The funny thing about having a release date early in the month is that it sneaks up on you. After all, we’re still in February. That means The Tropic of Serpents won’t be out for a while yet, right? Wrong — it’s out next Tuesday, i.e. March 4th. (For those of you in the U.S. and Canada, at least. UK folks, your street date is the 20th of June. After that, Tor and Titan should be publishing more or less simultaneously, so you won’t have the added wait.)

Kirkus, by the way, not only gave Tropic a starred review; they listed it as one of their Best Bets for March. They even used the cover art as the top image for the post, which is yet another sign that Todd Lockwood and Irene Gallo are awesome.

2) If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll have a chance to hear me read from The Tropic of Serpents at 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 9th, at Borderlands Books. It’s my intent to also publicly announce the title for the third book there, as an added treat for my hometown peeps.

3) Also for Bay Area types, I’m going to be at FOGcon weekend after next. I unfortunately had to back out of one of my panels because of a karate belt test on Friday night, but I’ll still be doing several things that weekend:

Friday, 3-4:15 p.m. Narnia, Hogwarts, and Oz, Oh My!


What are our favorite secret worlds? What do we love about them? Why is a secret world so useful for storytelling? What can we learn from the ways used to access these places? What about worlds which exclude some people from accessing them, such as adults or non-magical people–are these worlds problematic or necessary? Or somewhere between the two?


M: Tim Susman. Marie Brennan, Valerie Estelle Frankel, Naamen Gobert Tilahun
Saturday, 10:30-11:45 Secret History and Alternate History; their similarities, differences, and how to write them


Tim Powers, in books like Declare and The Drawing of the Dark, has brought us into the realm of secret history — the events that really took place around known historical facts. Harry Turtledove, Philip K. Dick, and many others have brought us into the realm of alternate history — the what-if-things-had-been-different. (Indeed, one could argue that Mary Gentle’s Ash is secret alternate history!) What about these works fascinates us, and how do we put them together?


M: Bradford Lyau. Marie Brennan, Tim Powers, Tim Susman
Saturday, 4:30-5:45 Reading


Marie Brennan, Alyc Helms, Michael R. Underwood

4) In non-Tropic-related news, I participated in the Book of Apex blog tour over at Books Without Any Pictures. There’s a review of my story “Waiting for Beauty,” a brief interview, and a guest post wherein I talk about how writing historical fiction helped me become better at worldbuilding in general.

5) And Now For Something Completely Different: I really love both of these art sets, one of Disney princess in historically accurate costumes (the last image is the best!), and one of celebrities cosplaying as Disney characters.

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Supernatural Re-Watch: “Faith” and the Dumber Than Dean Award

I promise I’ll post something other than photos and Supernatural analysis eventually. My brain’s a little wrung out from revision, so right now I’m just kind of coasting along, recovering.

Also — speaking of a wrung-out brain — ignore what I said last post about discussing “Scarecrow” some more. I managed to get my wires crossed, and mashed “Scarecrow” and “Shadow” together in my head. (They’re both one word starting with S, and they both have Meg, okay? And I don’t have much functioning grey matter at the moment.)

Instead, we will talk about “Faith” and the Dumber Than Dean Award.

I’m pretty sure “Faith” is the episode that inaugurated this award, though we didn’t actually identify the award as a Thing until later.

For those who don’t remember or haven’t seen the episode, it starts off with a prologue in medias res, where Sam and Dean are down in a basement rescuing some kids from a creature that isn’t vulnerable to bullets. Dean shoots a stun gun at the thing, but misses, so Sam tosses his own to Dean and takes the kids to safety. Dean gets knocked down and then, at the last second when the creature is running at him, fires and hits. Except that he’s lying in a puddle — the same puddle the creature is standing in — which means he electrocutes himself, too. Credit sequence, and when we come back, a hospital doctor is telling Sam that Dean’s had the equivalent of a massive heart attack, and could basically kick the bucket at any moment.

The Dumber Than Dean Award is given to the character in an episode of Supernatural who makes you yell “Aaaaaaaugh, no!!!!” at the screen because they just did something incredibly bone-headed. We gave out this award quite frequently. (Sometimes Dean won it, and then we were all sad for him.) Which makes it sound like the show is full of people being stupid, but actually, most of the situations were like this one: bone-headed, yes, but plausible. I mean, let’s face it; if you spend your life running around hunting monsters, all it takes is one mistake to get yourself killed. This could easily be how Dean’s life ends. (It would be, if it weren’t for the plot of the episode.) So while I’m yelling “Aaaaaaaugh, no!!!!” at the screen, I’m not yelling at the writers. I absolutely believe Dean would commit that error.

So far as I can recall, that was the general pattern of the award. It wasn’t OOC stupidity (to borrow a term from RPGs); it wasn’t given out when the characters did something dumb because the plot required it. In fact, I remember relatively few instances of Idiot Plots, though I may find more as I re-watch. Instead it was awarded to the characters when, out of carelessness or lack of information or the natural consequence of their psychological flaws, they did something which made total sense to them and was totally, totally wrong for the situation.

We eventually started giving out a corollary prize: the Smarter Than Dean Award. This went to the character in a given episode who did something that made you go “huh, that was really clever!” I mentioned before that sometimes the show manages neat bits of narrative jiujitsu; many of those got the Smarter Than Dean Award. When a character puts the pieces together faster than you expect, or comes up with a nifty solution, or sees through a trick when the usual shape of the story leads you to expect that they’re going to fall for it, they get the Smarter Than Dean Award. (Sometimes Dean won this one, and then we were all very proud of him.)

Bonus entertainment points for any episode where the same character wins both awards. (Especially if it’s Dean.)

A few other comments on “Faith”: I think they do a reasonably good job of handling the issue of Dean’s salvation coming at somebody else’s expense, within the confines of an episodic structure that means the next ep can’t be all about the fallout. It’s certainly part and parcel of a running motif around Dean’s death; we’ve already had “Skin” and the shapeshifter dying while wearing his face, plus “Asylum” where Sam pulls the trigger on him, and in the near future we get “Nightmare” with the vision of Dean being shot and killed and “The Benders” with the reference to Dean being legally dead. That, of course, only ramps up in later seasons. I don’t remember whether Dean ever explicitly references this incident again, but I feel like his dialogue is at least written in a fashion consistent with the notion that he remembers he’s living on stolen time, and that other people who deserved to be saved weren’t.

Man, though, it’s odd seeing Julie Benz as a tragic Lifetime Movie character, when I mostly know her as Darla from Angel.

I think “Faith” is one of the few episodes from S1 that really struck me as memorable on a first watching. Not brilliant, but it carried the right amount of character significance to hit my particular buttons. (“Asylum” is another one, because I’m a sucker for plot devices that cause characters to start expressing issues they normally want to keep hidden.) As mentioned above, it also fits into a larger thematic picture, though that doesn’t become apparent for a while. If the first season is mostly B to B-plus episodes, this one would get a B-plus.

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