Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 52

The Molly Southbourne trilogy, by Tade Thompson

Molly Southbourne's parents taught her four simple rules:

"If you see yourself, run.
Don't bleed.
Blot, burn, bleach.
Find a hole, find your parents."

For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she’s been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she’ll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

This set of three cross-genre novellas has one of the most intriguing premises that I've ever come across. I don't want to give away more than the blurb, because half of what is so fun and compelling about these novellas is learning along with Molly exactly what's going on and why.

I read the first novella in a single gulp, and would have continued if it hadn't been late at night. The next day I immediately bought and read the next two.

The first novella stands on its own and comes to a reasonable conclusion. The second two do not stand alone; they're just as good as the first, but different in tone and themes. The first novella gains a lot of power from the inexplicable mystery of how and why Molly's power exists and works the way it does. The second two provide unexpectedly satisfying solutions to many of the mysteries, but sometimes an unsolved mystery has a haunting quality that the solution lacks.

( Read more... )

Any story about clones and doppelgangers will be about identity, but Molly Southbourne is also about generational trauma and the inflection point where people have to choose to do what's always been done, or commit themselves to doing things better even when they don't know if that's possible.

As far as I know these novellas are a complete trilogy. I really hope Tade writes more of them though, however, because I would love to read more in this world and about these characters.

Content notes: body horror, violence. Tade is a psychiatrist, and his medical knowledge makes a plotline in the second book particularly extra-horrifying.

(I know Tade via the internet, hence the first name. I'd have written the same review if I didn't, though, only I'd have used his surname.)

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Dictation Report

The world is on fire and I now have both wrists in strappy black braces which are either cool and Matrix-like or fetish gear. So I have been looking into dictation software, to rest them and in case I need surgery. The gold standard is Dragon, which does not run on Macs.

Here are my experiments with Word and Apple's built-in dictation. The texts are a random movie review from FFA, and some excerpts from my Zoe books.

Original: 2017 Icelandic horror-ish movie where a guy gets a weird phone call in the middle of the night from his ex-boyfriend. This was really well-made, great acting, beautifully shot. There is not a single straight man in it.

Apple: 17 Icelandic Forest no where a guy gets a beer bottle in the middle of the night from his ex-boyfriend this really really work well name great acting beautifully shot curious. There is not a single straight man and Saturday, June 25, 2022 wow

They were all coming out like that, so I thought I would try it with a mike and AirPods, and fix my AirBook's refusal to load the new OS while I was at it. This turned out to be a day-long odyssey in which I had to expose myself to a covid superspreader Apple store, got stuck at a horrible mall in 96 F/35.5 C heat, and nearly had to threaten an ADA complaint to get a California Pizza Kitchen to seat me in its outside plaza for outside eating rather than either inside or nowhere.

Here are my results with mike and AirPods:

Original: He couldn’t stop wondering about his new client. What sort of woman was brave or reckless enough to agree to testify against the crime boss who practically ruled the city?

If she’d been a shifter like himself, he could maybe halfway understand it. But she was a human: a working woman, a paramedic on the late shift. She must be terrified.

Dictation: He couldn't stop wondering about his new client. What sort of woman was great or reckless enough read to testify against the crime boss to practically route the city?

Yes in a shift or like himself he could maybe halfway understand it. But she was a human: a working woman, a paramedic on the beach. She must be terrified.


Original: He had been taught that dragons always knew their mates at first sight. He’d imagined it as the difference between seeing a stranger and seeing someone you know.

Oh, he’d imagined thinking. Oh, I know that person.

Dictation: He had been taught that dragons always knew their mates at first sight. He didn't mention it is the difference between seeing a stranger in seeing someone you know.

Oh, heater mentioned thinking. Oh, I knew that person.

Then I tried Dragon Anywhere on my phone. Without a mike, since it's a Samsung so the AirPods are incompatible. I tried it on the same text, and got ONE error.

Dragon on phone it is. If the phone gets too annoying, I will try running Windows on my Mac or buying a cheap used Dell desktop. But for now, you will get to experience my dictated book reviews.

Hardest part? Getting Dragon to recognize me saying the word "this," which is surprisingly hard to spell phonetically when you think your phonetic pronunciation is in fact "this."

No, wait. The hardest part is actually going to be returning the goddamn AirPods.

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US Supreme Court Open Discussion post

Rage here.

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Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll

A dense and academic but enlightening book about what it says on the can; I got through it by skipping all the Foucault and other philosophy, along with some of the math.

(In general, I take the position that any paragraph involving certain types of non-standard word usage is skippable. For instance (not actual example AS FAR AS I KNOW) Re-Membering Herstory: Men Con/Descending to Women.)

Addiction by Design is an in-depth look at how machine gambling, like video poker, is designed and regulated, how it affects gamblers, and what gamblers get out of it.

The parts about game and casino design are infuriating and sad; the details are fascinating and new, but the overall thrust is unsurprising. Huge amounts of money, market research, and brainpower are spent to make the machines and the environment around them addictive and deceptive, and to keep gamblers going until all their money is gone. Machine gaming is not regulated in any meaningful way. Habitual machine gamblers in Las Vegas often lose all their money, and find it very difficult to quit because gambling machines are literally everywhere, including in grocery stores.

What gamblers get from machine gambling is the surprising part. They're not gambling in the vain hope of winning lots of money, which is what I always assumed. (The vain hope of hitting it big does seem to be a big factor in non-machine gambling.) The machine gamblers are gambling for its own sake. Their hope of winning isn't for money per se, but because money will enable them to play longer. People who end up at Gamblers Anonymous often gamble for twelve hours straight, not stopping to eat or drink or, in some cases, even to use the bathroom.

According to this book, and it's intensively researched, gambling machines are better understood as dissociation machines. Gamblers play to enter "the zone," in which they lose themselves and enter a dissociative state in which they forget not only their problems, but their very selves. It's a highly addictive state, though like many addictions it quickly stops being actually enjoyable.

Casino designers know exactly why the machine gamblers are there, and employ an astounding amount of money and cleverness to encourage and enable their dissociation addiction. Everything from the game design itself to the casino layout to the machine placement to the chairs to the bathroom access is meticulously researched and optimized. In one case, a team of experts spent a month working on a single "bing!" sound to make it satisfying and comforting rather than annoying or distracting.

Unsurprisingly, the casino owners and designers focus on the design itself rather than on what they're doing to the gamblers, and wave off the addictive elements as the gamblers' own responsibility.

This is a depressing and infuriating book. It's not just how exploitative and predatory the whole thing is, but that so much time and effort and money and cleverness is poured into making something that preys on people and makes their lives worse.

For instance, they designed incredibly expensive and sophisticated comfortable, ergonomic chairs so people won't get uncomfortable while gambling for hours and hours. Why not design and provide those chairs to office workers, for whom they would actually make their lives better? Welcome to capitalism, where the office workers get cheap chairs that cause orthopedic problems that they have to pay to fix, if they even can with their inadequate paychecks and medical care, and the gamblers get perfect chairs to lull them into an addictive dissociative state that will ruin their lives.

Schüll notes that the gamblers' subjective experience of "the zone" sounds very similar to something you've probably heard of in a positive sense, which is "flow."

I find machine gambling very boring and have never found a video game more than mildly enjoyable, but I absolutely understand the appeal of repetitive tasks. I can weed or prune or do other repetitive garden tasks pretty much indefinitely, in a blissful state of losing myself in the task. I join with the garden in a way that sounds very similar to the way gamblers say they become the machine. I also love arranging things, like alphabetizing books or putting rocks in a border. I can also get in the zone via certain types of repetitive exercise, like lifting weights.

We tend to draw a hard line between dissociation (bad!) and flow (good!) but if you think of it as a state of absorption in a repetitive task to the point that you lose yourself and feel that you become the task, it's clearly something that a lot of humans experience and enjoy and and seek to experience over and over. If gardening was cleverly optimized by teams of experts, I might well slide from doing it for fun to doing it addictively.

In the chapter on treating machine gambling (insanely difficult when the gamblers are living in Las Vegas, where they can't escape it) it's noted that people tend to switch one addiction for another. I wondered if the machine gamblers specifically might be able to do some harm reduction by switching to home video gaming, which at least won't suck their money. You can play video poker at home just as a game, with no money involved. It wouldn't be in the casino environment, but it might serve as a kind of methadone for the casino's heroin.

via landingtree . Their review here.

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Biggles - The Boy, by W. E. Johns

To take on a wounded leopard, unarmed, with a fear-crazed elephant to boot...

Biggles' boyhood in India! Every chapter has Kid Biggles encountering a different danger or often multiple different dangers, accompanied by a short monograph on the habits, habitats, and perils of cobras, pythons, kraits, mad elephants, rabid dogs, angry buffaloes, man-eating leopards, man-eating tigers, man-eating crocodiles, etc. At one point Johns writes It must not be imagined the James encountered a dangerous beast every time he went out but that is definitely the impression the book gives.

I don't rec this except to the completist, as it's got high levels of background and sometimes foreground racism, and is written in a different style which is very consciously for children and is both educational and a bit stilted. But if what you're really here for is Kid Biggles leaping from a riverbank onto a crocodile's head (I sure was) this book provides.

Crocodiles aside, it has a very fun portrayal of Biggles as a kid, young and inexperienced but recognizably the same person we meet as an adult - quick-witted, cool-headed, brave, and kind. Despite all the animal battles, they don't all end in animal death and he explicitly respects everything's right to live. He comes across as a very sweet kid.

At one point his father, who spends the entire book reluctantly okaying Biggles to do all sorts of insane things so long as he's careful, points out that his plan to stake out the riverbank for a man-eating crocodile will interfere with his schooling. Biggles promptly offers to take his schoolbooks and read at all moments when he's not actively crocodile-watching.

I also appreciated the backstory that had recurrent fevers as a child. Need fic where they recur as an adult, which they probably would because they were probably malaria. This also makes more sense of von Stalhein thinking he's delicate and the general impression that while he's physically adept, he's not a big brawny guy and achieves what he does based more on wits, chutzpah, quick reflexes, and friendliness than on beating people up.

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Some of Your Blood, by Theodore Sturgeon

In this ambiguously supernatural epistolatory novel, a soldier in an unstated war (but I'm guessing Vietnam) is thrown into solitary for attacking his CO. The circumstances of the attack are peculiar, and the soldier is recategorized as a psych case. About half the novel consists of letters between military psychologists who are treating/investigating him, and the other half is the soldier's autobiography, written in third person on the suggestion of the psychologist.

The soldier, who calls himself George Smith, had a nasty, brutish, and short childhood with an abused sickly mother and an abusive alcoholic father; when he's sent to a juvenile home, it's a huge step up. His sole interest in life is hunting, which he describes in obsessive detail (so warning for non-sadistic animal harm). His account has subtle lacunae, which are picked up on by the psychologist. This was written in 1961, so the psychology is unsurprisingly Freudian.

I'll spoiler-cut just in case, though the blurb gives it away and early events very strongly suggest it. ( Read more... )

Recced by scioscribe as an example of "is it SFF or not?" I'd never heard of it before and hadn't realized Sturgeon has written anything other than SF. It's an odd, intriguing book with an excellent final line.

Content notes: Graphic domestic violence, lots of hunting-related animal harm, non-graphic rape, child death.

Currently $1.99 on Kindle

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The Annual Migration of Clouds & These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed

These are unrelated novellas.

These Lifeless Things has two timelines. In one the Earth is taken over by Lovecraftian horrors and almost all humans are killed; this one is very effective and moving but stops rather than ends. This makes sense because it's a found document, but is still frustrating.

In the other timeline, it's a hundred years later, humanity has inexplicably recovered and has civilization again, the horrors are gone (OR ARE THEY), people don't seem to understand exactly what happened either during the invasion or afterward, and for no clear reason mostly don't believe the documents of it they do have. Grad students are researching the eldritch horror time; one has the found document, but the other grad students don't believe or care about it.

I didn't understand what was going on with the future plot or what its relevance was; maybe a commentary on how the past is hard to fathom and people deny reality? But the denial of reality is typically for political reasons, and there's no political reason I could figure out why people would overwhelmingly pretend an event that killed most of the population was something other than what it was, especially since there's no competing narrative of what did happen.

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The Annual Migration of Clouds is much more successful. Reid is a young woman born after an apocalypse combining climate change and a hereditary, possibly sentient fungal disease. Her community lives in what used to be a university, eking out a hardscrabble and sometimes brutal existence that still allows for relationships, art, and trade. It's one of the most convincing depictions of a post-apocalyptic community I've seen - the opposite of the one-note dystopia.

Reid and her mother both have the fungus. Its effects are extremely variable, but two things are consistent: it controls your behavior to protect you/itself (by preventing you from doing dangerous things), and it often (maybe always?) eventually kills its host. I was very curious about this contradiction, which doesn't get addressed much but is probably an accidental side effect given that the fungus seems to want its hosts to survive. Mostly the fungus is important because of Reid's concerns over whether and how it's affecting her and her mother's free will.

The story begins when Reid receives a letter inviting her to join a fabled scientific domed community. The letter itself is of a technological level unachievable to her own people, but no one's ever come back from that dome or even seen it; does it really exist, or is it some kind of weird trick? If it is what it says it is, does she want to leave her own people to join a group that's hoarding knowledge rather than sharing it?

I will say upfront, so you're not disappointed or annoyed by where this novella stops, that the questions about the dome don't get answered, the entire action of the story is Reid making various preparations to leave while she tries to decide whether she's actually going to go, and the story ends when she makes her decision. The story itself is great and the ending is satisfying on an emotional level, but I really wanted more. I hope Mohamed expands this novella, because the world is fantastic.

Have any of you read anything by her? What did you think?

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So THAT'S what was going on!

There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.

I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!

This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.

In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.

When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.

More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.

In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).

I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.

Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!

Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?

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Biggles Fails to Return, by W. E. Johns

"He hid a Pernod card and bumped me on the boko when I tried to have a dekko at it."

Biggles fails to return from a secret mission, leaving his friends and fellow pilots Ginger, Algy, and Bertie Wooster puzzled and worried. They learn that he was trying to rescue a Sicilian princess in Monaco (long story), and the last anyone saw, he'd been shot, the princess had vanished, and they're both presumed dead. Ginger, Algy, and Bertie to the rescue!

They decide to split up once they're in Monaco, and the story splits with them. Their cover stories and what happens to them all depend on their backgrounds and personalities. Ginger, who doesn't speak French, impersonates a Spanish onion-seller and gets a bit too caught up in his role. The aristocrat Bertie impersonates a troubadour, and his adventure turns on the fact that he once owned a boat in Monaco. As we follow each of them in turn, we see them reacting to events that they don't understand but we do, because we saw one of the other guys encounter the same person or place. It's extremely fun and well-done.

Not only is the plot excellent and unexpected given the series it's in (Biggles doesn't appear till the book is almost over), but it's very atmospheric and full of cool little details. Ginger's cover almost gets blown because he has English onions rather than the sweeter Spanish ones. A location that could have been anywhere as it's mostly just plot-important is known for being abandoned except for a horde of feral cats. The lost princess is a complete badass and clearly the heroine of her own book. This book is consistently better and smarter and more fun than it really needed to be.

I highly recommend Biggles Fails to Return, but not as a first Biggles book. A lot of its fun is in how it upends the normal pattern of the series, and you need to be used to the normal pattern first.

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Garden Update

The garden is blossoming marvelously. Bees swarm the pink and white blossoms of the blackberry thicket. Tiny daisy-like feverfew is flowering everywhere, along with an unidentified purple flower. (If you'd like to see pics or try to ID it, they're up at Instagram and Facebook.)

The raspberries have tiny green berries, and my blueberry has berries too! The latter is draped in bird netting, while I'm keeping a close watch on the former. The squirrels ate all my cherries while they were still green, goddammit.

Herbs are thriving, as is my shady hugelkulture Asian greens bed, which I worried wouldn't get enough sun. My sunny beds mostly failed to germinate at all; I think I underestimated the heat of the sun even though they don't get it for that long. I'm going to try again in the sunny beds, this time with sun-loving plants like tomatoes.

My strawberries, both cultivated and wild, are very happy in multiple locations. The latter are in a very hard-to-water place, and their berries are not very juicy.

The haskaps did not thrive. I replanted them in a sunnier location, but they seem done for. The salmonberry is thriving, the thimbleberry is struggling, the salal I planted in shade is happy and the salal I planted in sun is miserable so I will try transplanting it.

I pre-sprouted morning glory seeds, and I still only got a few to become actual plants. I think my fences are all too shady for them. Next year I will try climbing roses.

I've further cozified the loft with handmade rag rugs (via Etsy, not made by me) and a knockoff Love Sack from Target.

I'm building a mini retaining wall of unmortared rocks by collecting side-of-the-highway rockfall rocks every time I pass a certain area, then setting them up like Legos, bit by bit. One-handed.

I have had my left wrist mostly out of commission since early February. I have now failed two months of PT and a steroid shot, and am on a second round of PT and steroid iontophoresis. If that fails I may need surgery, hence the questions about dictation. It's a nuisance, not a misery; it's not painful if I wear a brace and don't stress it, and I cope way better with mobility issues than with pain. I mostly mention this so you can be impressed with how much I'm managing to do literally one-handed.

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