Marie Brennan's Blog, page 221

The DWJ Project: Believing is Seeing - Seven Stories

Another short story collection. Two of the stories in here are repeats from collections I've previously read: "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" (in Warlock at the Wheel ) and "The Sage of Theare" (in both that and Mixed Magics ). The other five are new, in the sense that I haven't read them before; I didn't think to approach these things in publication order.

"The Master" didn't do a lot for me; it felt a little too weird and disjointed, not drawing together until the end, and even then not enough. That scene gave the story a point, but didn't do anything to put previous events in context.

"Enna Hittims" got me off on the wrong foot with the way Anne's parents took care of her -- or rather, failed to -- when she was seriously ill with the mumps. This might be the neglected-child version of what I've started thinking of as the Goon Problem: I don't mind the titular character in Archer's Goon being horrible at people, because the novel both fleshes out that situation and waters it down with other narrative material, but I dislike that motif when it shows up in condensed form in DWJ's short fiction. Anne being left to more or less starve, and then being laughed at by her father for the disfigurement brought on by the mumps, really rubbed me the wrong way, even though some of the kids in the novels suffer far worse. The end was touching, though.

"The Girl Who Loved the Sun" was pretty good, in a tragic and deeply disturbed way.

"What the Cat Told Me" is fun but not memorable; the plot is fairly mundane, lifted up a touch by the narrative voice of the cat.

"Nad and Dan Adn Quaffy" I remember reading before, and it still doesn't do a lot for me. As with my complaint about the stories in Stopping for a Spell and Warlock at the Wheel, the magic is too random and unexplained, and the running motif with the typos doesn't amuse me enough. I do like the line about pretending to be the captain of a starship, though.

The DWJ Project: Wild Robert

Heather, a girl whose parents are curators for a "British Trust" (i.e. National Trust) estate, accidentally calls forth a Jacobean-era man known as Wild Robert, who runs around wreaking havoc with magic.

This book is short enough that I suspect in technical terms it's only a novelette -- no more than fifteen thousand words, and probably less. It could easily have been included in one of DWJ's collections of short fiction, rather than being published independently. But it's a pleasant enough story; I found it much nicer than the stories compiled in Stopping for a Spell, which were also put out as individual books.

As for spoilers . . . .

My complaint, to the extent that I have one, is that this only feels like the beginning of the tale. We get the backstory for Wild Robert -- and unpleasant backstory it is, too; it's really awful to think of his own brothers cutting out his heart -- but not the denoument; he vanishes at sunset, and while Heather realizes her promise binds her to raise him again tomorrow, and she makes plans for how to "civilize" him, it's just a hand-wave in the direction of a story I can't really believe would go quite that simply.

I'd love to see a version of this where Heather doesn't get the explanation so easily (by calling up Janine), and where dealing with the problems Wild Robert presents gets played out in full. Alas, it will never be.
Next, I think it's time for another short story collection.

The DWJ Project: Hexwood

I said at the end of my last post that I wasn't sure if I'd ever read Hexwood before. I can say now that I'm 99% I hadn't -- because surely I would have remembered The One Where Diana Wynne Jones Wrote an Episode of Doctor Who.

Seriously, how else am I supposed to describe a book that has dragons, robots, medieval knights, evil galactic overlords, a girl with four not-so-imaginary voices in her head, and a simulation device that might end up assimilating the entire planet Earth? Plus a story that doesn't quite go according to normal linear chronology. I pity the poor soul who had to write cover copy for this thing. Here's what my edition has:

Strange things happen at Hexwood Farm. From her window, Ann Staveley watches person after person disappear through the farm's gate -- and never come out again. Later, in the woods nearby, she meets a tormented sorcerer, who seems to have arisen from a centuries-long sleep. But Ann knows she saw him enter the farm just that morning. Meanwhile, time keeps shifting in the woods, where a small boy -- or perhaps a teenager -- has encountered a robot and a dragon. Long before the end of their adventure, the strangeness of Hexwood has spread from Earth right out to the center of the galaxy.

Me, I would say that the story concerns a device called a Bannus, which was designed to aid in decision-making: given suitable starting parameters, it simulates every possible set of outcomes. It was built by a race of people called the Reigners, five of whom are now basically the aforementioned evil galactic overlords; when a Bannus left on Earth gets out of control, they rush to try and shut it down, but instead the Bannus keeps trapping everything within its simulation.

Does that make any sense? I can't tell. This book is extremely hard to summarize, and moderately confusing to read, too. I did enjoy it, but you've got to be willing to let go of linearity, and be okay with the fact that many of the characters spend most of the book being totally adrift as to who anybody is and what order they're encountering each other in.

It feels a bit unfair to call this one structurally messy, when the Bannus keeps looping its simulation, so that Ann keeps seeing Hume at different ages, and doesn't remember being Vierran at all for most of the book. Certainly it's odd when the story abandons her and Hume and Mordion for a chunk of pages in favor of looking at what the Reigners are up to, but I can't say what might have been better without actually sorting out the internal chronology of this story, which would take a lot of work -- if it's even possible. The Bannus says near the end that it extended its field through the Reigner's communication links, so the sense that Reigner One, Reigner Three, and Vierran went to Earth after Martin told Ann about seeing Reigner Four there is presumably no more trustworthy than anything else in the story. It's like this book has an unreliable narrator, and that narrator is named Time.

So let's talk about other things. Hexwood has the DWJ thing of really serious unpleasantness in the backstory, though in this case it shows up far more directly than I'm used to; Mordion reliving the memories of how he was tortured as a child is pretty horrible -- what Reigner One did to Kessalta! -- as is the Reigners' cold-blooded plan to use Vierran for breeding. (Mordion kind of goes onto the list with Thomas Lynn, Tacroy, Howl, and Mark Lister, of male love interests broken by their pasts, who have to be freed before they can relate to anybody else properly.) It also has a mythical underlayer, though in this case I have to admit my reaction is along the lines of buh? Arthur and Merlin and Fitela kind of come out of nowhere at the end, and those names are decidedly secondary to their identities as the King and the Prisoner and the Boy. Then again, my brain was so busy keeping track of who was whom in the Bannus' field -- Fors = Reigner Four, Ambitas = Reigner Two, Bedefer = John Bedford, etc -- that I couldn't spare a lot of attention for even more layers of secret identity.
I suspect this book would repay re-reading, now that I have (kind of) sorted out what the hell is going on. But that will have to wait; with this, I cross the halfway mark in the DWJ Project, and since I'd like to finish the whole thing before the one-year anniversary of her death, I can't really spare the time to backtrack.

The project is becoming a bit of a slog at this point, I must admit; middles are like that. Getting through nearly fifty books by a single author in a single year is kind of a marathon undertaking anyway. But I've deliberately saved a few of my second-tier favorites for the latter half of the project; I'm nearly done with the stuff I don't remember very well or never read before, and so it should be pretty clear sailing after this. As always, if you have any specific requests you'd like me to address sooner rather than later, just let me know.

Are my characters insane?

Okay, this is totally random, inspired by rachelmanija exercising her fledgling therapist muscles by diagnosing random fictional characters according to DSM-IV criteria.

Which, if any, of my characters have diagnosable psychological disorders?

I honestly don't know; IANA psychiatrist, therapist, or anything else of the sort. The closest I've come is marrying a guy with an undergrad degree in psychology. But Miryo, Mirage, or Eclipse; Lune, Invidiana, Deven, Antony, Jack, Galen, Irrith, Eliza, Dead Rick -- okay, that last one I'm sure has at least one certifiable issue, possibly more. Short story characters are also fair game, if any of those have been memorable enough for you. Hell, if you've played in a game with me, you can take a crack at my PCs, too. (No fair diagnosing Sagara with gender identity disorder. That one's too easy.)

I suspect most of my protagonists, if not side characters, are too stable to really display anything DSM-worthy. But it amuses me to ask. :-)

The DWJ Project: A Sudden Wild Magic

The hidden leaders of magical society on Earth discover that a neighboring universe is using our world as an experimental laboratory: siccing problems (like global warming) on us with the intent of seeing how we cope with them. They mount an expedition to put an end to the problem.

My recollection is that when I was a kid, most of Diana Wynne Jones' work was shelved in the children's department; this book, however, was in the nascent Young Adult section. It's certainly aimed at an older readership. The only work of Jones' I can think of that's comparable is Deep Secret, a later (and more successful) book. This one doesn't seem to be anybody's favorite -- though I could be wrong -- and a great many people don't like it at all. So bear that in mind when you decide whether to read the spoilers that follow.

If I had to sum up the core trouble I have with this book, it's that its attention is way too scattered over too many characters and ideas, with the result that none of them get the attention and development they need. (There are at least ten pov characters, possibly more.) In the case of certain aspects -- like the all-male, monastic society of Arth, and the decision of the sabotage team to undermine them with sensuality and sex -- that lack of sufficient development makes them weird and troubling.

Like Black Maria, I'm not entirely comfortable with the attempt to tackle gender issues head-on, partly because I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this particular attempt. Leathe is matriarchal and nasty; Arth is patriarchal and nearly as unpleasant, at least where the High Head is concerned. So, gender segregation is bad? That's awfully heavy-handed. And it doesn't fit in very well with the notion of idea theft and its effects on the world of the Pentarchy -- an issue that gets left until remarkably late in the tale, for something that is supposedly the core of the novel. I would be interested in the thing with Marceny splitting Herrel/Mark -- it's another iteration of the trope we've seen with Thomas Lynn and Tacroy and and Howl -- but it doesn't mesh very well with her psychic vampirism or the theft of ideas from Earth or the ossified traditions of Arth or, well, anything. You could have had an interesting story about Zillah and Mark/Herrel and Marceny, or about Arth and its repressed vibrations, or about Earth as the Pentarchy's screwed-up laboratory, but those three things don't seem to belong in a novel together.

(Also -- maybe because I've been re-reading the Wheel of Time -- I have zero patience for the obvious stupidity and prejudice that abounds in this story. Amusing as it is that nobody on Arth appears to have taken a good look at Earth conditions since the age of the dinosaurs, the actual playing out of everybody's wrong assumptions drives me batty.)

Based on the evidence of this and Deep Secret, I have to say that DWJ doesn't seem to have been very adept at writing about sexual tension or attraction. She tends to go at it head-on, but only in passing. That isn't a huge issue in Deep Secret, where that aspect of the relationship between Rupert and Maree is only a small element in the story; here, where it's one of the main weapons the surviving attack team is using against the Brothers of Arth, it's much more of a weakness. Where DWJ writes about adults elsewhere -- at least in the books I've covered so far in this project -- she mostly leaves sex out of the picture; it doesn't come up with Howl and Sophie, for example, beyond aesthetic attraction. (Even Howl's womanizing is put in terms of getting girls to fall in love with him.) The only successful counter-example I can think of is the brief moment Tom and Polly take for themselves before they pass through the gates of Hunsdon House in Fire and Hemlock.

It feels like DWJ, having set out to write for older readers, stiffened up and didn't approach it naturally, in a way that would let her strengths come through. There are details I like in this book, but they're too fleeting, weighed against the confusion that results from everything else being thrown in here. I probably prefer it to, say, Witch's Business (aka Wilkin's Tooth), which suffers the opposite problem, but it's definitely in my bottom tier of her work.

Re-reading Hexwood now, which I remember not at all. I think I read it once, but I might not even be right about that. We'll see.

Research for Writers, Part Three

I alllllllmost forgot to write my SF Novelists post this month! But never fear, I got it done, and you can read it here: "Research for Writers, #3: LCSH and Friends."

Comments disabled here; comment over there, and please be patient if you're new to the site; I'll have to fish your response out of the moderation queue before it will appear.

Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by james_nicoll at Mississippi Personhood AmendmentOriginally posted by soldiergrrrl at Mississippi Personhood AmendmentOriginally posted by twbasketcase at Mississippi Personhood AmendmentOriginally posted by gabrielleabelle at Mississippi Personhood AmendmentOkay, so I don't usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting very little no attention in the mainstream media.

Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the "Personhood Amendment". This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.

Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.

Jackson Women's Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn't just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.

What's more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women's Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later - on a Sunday - thanking me and noting that I'm one of the first "outside" people to contribute.

So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.

If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.

What to do?

- Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.

- If you can afford it, you can donate at the site's link.

- You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren't speaking out against this.

- Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.

London Incarnate

Normally I'm not a big fan of AU crack, which is to say, fanfics where the author has thrown in something totally random ("what if Frodo and Sam became pirates?") that really doesn't relate to the original source.

There are exceptions.

This is one of them.

It's a fic for the new BBC series Sherlock, the one that updates the characters to the modern day. You don't have to have seen the series, I think, to enjoy the story. But if you've read the Onyx Court books . . . yeah. Especially With Fate Conspire. It's so much of what I think about London, in terms of its history and the relationship between a city and its people, with lots of little details that ring such familiar bells for me. gollumgollum pointed me at it, and I'm so glad she did.

Go. Read. Enjoy.

Vail, here I come

Last year we had lovely weather for much of Sirens -- just warm enough in the afternoon to make a walk pleasantly brisk, and (if memory serves) not very rainy at all. This year . . . yeah, not so much. Highs just above freezing, and likely rain or snow.

Ah well. I guess I'll hang out in front of a roaring fire instead. :-)

I head off tomorrow, and look forward to seeing some of you there. For all the rest of you, blogging and such will be sparse for a few days. (As if it isn't sparse at other times, too.)

Books read, September 2011

What it says on the tin.

Knife of Dreams, Robert Jordan. Discussed elsewhere.

The Unstrung Harp, Edward Gorey. Re-read. Still the truest book on novel-writing I have ever read.

Lion's Blood, Steven Barnes. Alternate history, where African powers became the dominant empire and Europe is a backwater, raided for slaves to man farms in the colonies of Bilalistan. I had trouble getting into the right mental gear for this book; it takes place in the latter half of the eighteenth century by the Gregorian calendar, and I kept expecting the setting details of this world to map more directly to the U.S. at that time than they do. But Bilalistan is still a colony, not yet independent, and there aren't any railroads, etc; the men of the plantations still study and make frequent use of swordsmanship, though they do also have guns. Nothing wrong with that, of course; the entire chronology is different, from Alexander's day onward, and so the setting shouldn't just be the real nineteenth century with a Muslim paint job over it. But it kept distracting the analytical part of my brain.

As for the story itself, it was good, but never quite got me as strongly as I wanted it to. The inevitable betrayals brought on by the differences in Aidan's and Kai's stations didn't cut as deeply (for me, at least) as they might have, and -- this sounds like a contradiction, but it isn't -- I have a hard time buying the notion that Aidan doesn't just flat-out hate Kai by the end. Still, I may very well read the sequel, Zulu Heart, simply because the setting is so interesting.

Africa in History, Basil Davidson. This ate a whole lot of my month, which is part of why the list for September is so short. I don't remember who recommended this book to me, but I'm glad they did. Had you asked me what I know of African history at the end of my senior year of college (the high point of my knowledge on the subject), it would have gone: chapter and verse on human evolution, a good overview of Egypt up to the Roman period, uhhh, slavery and colonialism? Africa is, of course, a rather large continent to cover with a one-volume history, but in this case that's exactly what I needed; it gave me a framework on which to hang later reading.

Ignorant as I am of the subject, I can't really evaluate Davidson's scholarship. The areas and time periods he neglected, he seems to have done because of a lack of solid historical record; he could probably make better use of archaeological/anthropological evidence (a topic he seems less than fully comfortable with), but then, I can't be sure there's much of that available to him, either. The one thing I raised my eyebrow at was the occasional pan-African refrain, where he made claims for a universality of certain motifs across the continent and their distinctiveness as compared to other parts of the world; Africa's a big continent, with lots of natural divisions, and I'm dubious that one can make any universal observations that aren't vague to the point of uselessness. But it's not a major issue. On the whole, I found this very useful as a 101-level introduction.

Black Maria, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba, Patricia McKissack. Notice a theme for September? :-) This is part of the "Royal Diaries" series, and as such is a very brief little book, focused on Nzingha's childhood. Me, I wanted to read more about the actual "warrior queen" stage of things, which came later -- but that would have been both depressing (things didn't go so great for her people) and not nearly of as much interest to your average child, what with the politics and all.

22 Czech Legends, Alena Ježková, trans. Martin Tharp. A gift from my brother. They are distinctly legends, not folktales; it's all about how places got their names or ghosts that haunted particular castles, etc. Pleasant reading, and very quick.

Red Glove, Holly Black. Second in the Curse Workers trilogy. I'm very much enjoying these books; they're YA urban fantasy in a world where magic is known and illegal, and largely the province of mob-style crime families. Red Glove is somewhat middleish, compared to the first book (White Cat) -- it has a central plot, but Cassel spends a fair bit of the book either leaping to conclusions about it or trying to avoid thinking about it -- but I still enjoyed it, especially the bits where you watch Cassel twitching and edging backwards into being a good person.
Books abandoned this month: three. All three of them after reading a goodly chunk, too -- a hundred pages or so -- which annoyed me; I felt like quitting meant I I had wasted my time. Then I realized I was only pushing forward for that reason, which was a waste of my time, so I stopped.