Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 72

Watership Down Read-Along

sholio is hosting a Watership Down read-along, in four parts once a week.

The first part is up now, covering the departure from the Sandleford warren and the first part of the journey.

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Actual email I actually got.

Subject line: Have You Met Your New Suicide Requirement?

This is an actual, official email from an actual therapist organization. They're talking about a continuing education course but...

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As you may have guessed...

I am going through a bunch of unread books which are not by authors I already know I love, in the hope of having fewer/lighter boxes to move when I move again. I don't feel obliged to finish anything if I don't like it early on, so you're just getting reviews of the ones I did finish.

Books that went in discards without reviews as I didn't get very far: the book about penises with lots of dubiously sourced history, the children's fantasy where a little girl gets switched with her past counterpart and her siblings don't care, an extremely beat-up book on stretching that has nothing I can't get off the internet, exoticizing memoir about Americans who move to Mexico, insufferable book on mindfulness I bought to suck up to a professor, and many more which were more forgettable than those.

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Those Who Fall From the Sun, by Josephine Rector Stone

This children's SF novel starts with a lovely, haunting scene in which Alanna and her twin brother Mal are playing on the alien planet on which they've only just arrived. The scenery is colorful, and they discover that they can use the thin material of their protective suits to hang-glide on the wind. But Mal goes too high, and--

--Alanna wakes up on a spaceship. It was all a prophetic dream. I regret to say that that scene is the best part of the book, which is especially annoying as I picked up this book after reading the first few pages. Mal doesn't appear again till the last page, they never fly with their suits, and no one ever has any fun for the whole rest of the book.

I'm not surprised this book is so unknown, as while it has interesting ideas and imagery, it's really incoherent and jumbled and inconclusive.

Alanna is on a spaceship because Techmen have taken over the Earth and offered people food and medicine and other good things if they implant crystals in their foreheads, so the Techmen can suck their energy. Alanna's family were Independents who refused the crystals, so they've been packed off on a one-way colonizing expedition on a ship crewed by Techmen. Alanna meets a crotchety old man who the Techmen want, and they threaten that she'll never see her family again if she doesn't get them the old man.

Things which are never explained: why the Techmen want the old man, why they can't find him themselves given that everyone's cocooned in a spaceship they run, who the Techmen are, whether they're human or aliens or elves or what, how the Techmen got to Earth, and why the Techmen are escorting the Independents to another planet.

The cocooned Independents are chucked on to a planet, where Alanna gets separated from everyone and meets some alien rodents who she threatens for ages before adopting one as a pet. The Techmen again demand that she give them the old man, though at this point she has no idea where he even is. She meets an alien dog creature who kills some of the rodents (not her pet) and then it turns out they both can astral project and they take a tour of the planet where she sees an ooze devouring everything in its path. The dog creature explains that on this planet, everything gets glommed together and reconstituted as particles and then back to ooze. The Techmen kill Alanna's pet rodent before she and the dog shoo them away. Then she's reunited with her family.

Things which are never explained: How the colonization is going to work when the planet is covered in ooze that eats everything, why the old man was important, why the Techmen everything, why the dog randomly killed a rodent, why this book's editor didn't request more clarity.

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Covid Questions Answered

I regularly receive group emails full of Covid misinformation. I recently crowd-sourced a reply that I can use to reply-all to them. I know it won't change the minds of the determined anti-vaxxers, but I hope it may sway some people who are genuinely undecided, or be used by people who agree and send it to other undecided people in their own social circles.

Thank you very much to everyone who helped me put this together!

Please feel free to share the following with anyone you like, in whole or in part. Also please correct me if I got anything wrong. This is intended as a simple, basic informative email for people whose eyes glaze over at too much science and statistics. It's US-centric because I'm in the US.

THE EMAIL: COVID QUESTIONS ANSWERED


Please feel free to share this information with anyone. Many people are still on the fence over whether or not to take the vaccine. Getting the facts may help them decide.

Is the Covid vaccine more dangerous than getting Covid?

Getting Covid has killed over 600,000 people in the US. Getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has killed 3 people in the US. Nobody has died from getting the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines.

There is almost no risk from getting the vaccine, and a huge risk from getting the virus.

Does the Covid vaccine cause infertility?

The Covid vaccines do not cause infertility. However, getting Covid can cause impotence.

Link: Covid causes erectile dysfunction.

If you're concerned about difficulties with fertility, you should be more worried about Covid than the Covid vaccine.

Is Covid something to worry about even though most people survive?

Many serious diseases are only deadly for a small minority of the people they infect. That doesn't mean they're not real or serious. For instance, most people who contract polio have no symptoms at all. But we consider polio a serious disease that should be vaccinated against, because it's very contagious and that small proportion of people who do die or become paralyzed adds up quickly. Covid is similar in that way.

Are Covid vaccines actually vaccines?

Yes, they are vaccines. A vaccine is a substance that causes immunity to whatever you’re vaccinating against. This can be a weaker live form of the virus (such as the measles vaccine), or a component such as a viral package protein (influenza vaccine) or a bacterial cell wall (pneumonia vaccine).

Pfizer and Moderna do this via mRNA that tells your cells to produce one of the covid spike proteins. Because that protein isn't recognised by the human immune system, it creates an immune response that protects against Covid. Other Covid vaccines use harmless non-Covid viruses to do the same thing.

Does the Covid vaccine alter your genes?

It does not. It instructs your cells to produce a spike protein, which alerts your immune system to protect you from Covid. That does not alter your genes in any way.

Does the Covid vaccine protect you from Covid?

Yes, it does. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are 95% effective at preventing you from catching or transmitting Covid. Johnson and Johnson is about 70% effective at preventing transmission and infection.

Link: Pfizer vaccine in Israel shows 97-94% effectiveness.

Have the Covid vaccines been tested?

The Covid vaccines currently available in the US have been extensively tested. Pfizer enrolled 43,661 people in trials before it was released to the general public; the trials have demonstrated that it was both safe and effective. Johnson & Johnson enrolled 43,783 people in trials. Other vaccine trials have similar numbers.

I personally know several people who were involved in the Covid vaccine trials.

Link: Johnson and Johnson vaccine trials.

The technology used to develop the Covid vaccines is not new. Research has been ongoing for coronavirus vaccines for many years, particularly since the SARS epidemic in 2003. Research into mRNA vaccines (like Pfizer and Moderna) has also been ongoing for years - there have been human trials ongoing since 2006. The Covid vaccines make use of this research. The vaccines themselves are new because Covid is new, but they were able to be produced so quickly because the technology they use already existed.

The reason the vaccines are currently under Emergency Authorization is because they're so new. They will be approved soon.

Link: Why the vaccines are under Emergency Authorization.

Does it matter if teenagers get Covid?

It is correct that children and teenagers are very unlikely to die of Covid, though a small number of them have. However, a much larger number of children and teenagers have developed Long Covid, a serious chronic illness which currently has no treatment, after getting Covid.

Link - Long Covid in teenagers and children.

Also, even if teenagers and children are fine themselves, they can transmit Covid to more vulnerable people, who may then die of it. No child wants to give their grandma a disease that kills her.

Link: Children likely to transmit Covid.

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The Lesbihens, by Gwendoline Jones. Reveal and Review!

Literally every single one of you who took the Lesbihens poll was wrong about what this book was about. And so was I, and I DID read the blurb before making this regrettable purchase.

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Despite the title and cover, The Lesbihens has nothing to do with chickens. It is not about lesbian chicken shifters, lesbian chicken farmers, lesbian chickens, human lesbians with pet chickens, or lesbian chickens with pet humans. It does not even involve chicken metaphors.

The Lesbihens, inexplicably, is about the romance between a lesbian yoga teacher and a lesbian lighting designer. That's it, that's the book.

The blurb is highly misleading given the context of the cover and title:

When she moved to the city from the great rolling farmlands, Natasha never dared to bring hopes of romance along with her.

But everything changes when Peach, a gorgeous woman full of confidence and sunshine struts into her life and builds her nest right next to her, and Natasha knows that she has found something truly extraordinary.

I misread this as Natasha moving from the city to the great rolling farmlands. It's actually the other way around. I GUESS, as her coming from the farmlands is never mentioned at all in the first half of the book and if it comes up later (I started skimming) I blinked and missed it.

Also, the girlfriend's name is not Peach. Her name is Sawyer Martinez. Her nickname is not Peach. She is never called Peach. I did a search of the book to check this.

Not only is this book an amazing example of wildly misleading marketing, it's also an example of the power of word usage in making characters seem appealing or not. Sawyer whines, squeals, shrieks, screeches, screech-laughs, yell-laughs, and generally makes the kinds of sounds that make her exhausting just to read about. She's also an annoying hipster generally, but the words used to describe her really don't help.

Too much screeching girlfriend, not enough peeping poultry.

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The Lesbihens: The Poll

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View Poll: What is this book about?

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The Awakeners aka Northshore & Southshore, by Sheri Tepper

Does "bonkers even for Sheri Tepper" have any meaning? If so, let me just attempt to describe the plot of this book.

Thrasne is a young boatman in a terraformed world split by a great river which no one is allowed to cross. You can travel up and down, but not across. Also, no one is allowed to travel east. West only. If you leave your village and go east to another village, you can never go back. You can make a full-circle pilgrimage but it takes fifteen years. These are all religious prohibitions.

The river is contaminated with a blight which turns all organic matter to wood, so you need to fish very carefully because if you touch a wood fish, you become wood too unless you decontaminate it first. It's inhabited by many bizarre creatures, including strangeys which I thought were giant floating jellyfish but disappointingly turned out to be more like whales, which spit out bones which are ground up and made into a spice. I was so sure that bone-spice would turn out to have some sinister and/or revelatory meaning since practically everything else does, but no.

People are "selected" after they die, supposedly by God, and the unlucky ones are made into zombies that work till they fall apart; due to this, there is a secret society of people who will throw your body in the river so you can become a wood statue rather than a zombie.

And all that's not even the plot! That's just the world. The plot is that Thrasne has been obsessed since childhood with the image of a perfect woman, and carves hundreds of images of her in wood. He is shocked when he finds the body of a drowned woman who became a wood statue who looks just like his statues, and fishes her out and decontaminates her and keeps her in his cabin. He eventually discovers by drawing thousands of images of her and making a flip-book that she's alive, just very slowed-down, and is asking him to check on her daughter.

MEANWHILE the daughter has joined the world's main religion which is of course a sinister front for a terrible secret (religions in Tepper are always sinister fronts for terrible secrets) that the avian natives of the planet can only eat people once they're zombified with a fungus and that's why the zombies. This part is neatly set up by it being generally known that humans are not native to this world, and can only eat stuff native to the world if they also eat earth-grain along with it. This turns out to go both ways.

Before I continue with the plot, I have to say that Tepper's worldbuilding, minus the evil religions with their Nuggan-esque rules, is really neat. She's very good at creating fascinatingly bizarre worlds and the intricate and weird ways their ecologies work. Unfortunately it all tends to end in pro-environmentalist, pro-genocide, pro-eugenics, anti-religious tracts. One of these things is not like the others.

( But you probably want to hear about the extremely tragic results of cross-species premature ejaculation. )

I forgot to mention the half-alien-whale, half-human flying baby born from a wooden statue. Probably because she doesn't really have an effect on the plot.

There's WAY more worldbuilding than I mentioned. The first third of the book is basically a fever dream of an incredibly strange world, and I enjoyed that part a lot. The rest of it, while still containing enough world details to keep me interested, throws in a huge number of new characters and an allegory in a completely different tone from the rest of the book.

I love this cover. It 100% conveys the atmosphere of the book at its best.

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The Plants, by Kenneth McKenney

The beginning of what, we are portentously told via omniscient narration, is later known as the Events in Brandling is that England has a change in weather to very hot in the day and rainy at night, causing plants to grow lushly. In Brandling, a tiny village in Somerset, a guy named Charlie grows a huge squash.

The hump of the squash loomed in the darkness.

The squash continues to grow after he picks it, alarming some of the villagers.

They were men too close to the soil to remain unaffected by the squash and its size and the reactions it was beginning to cause.

They were beginning to feel its presence like fear.

Particularly Charlie:

"What'd you pick on me for?" he suddenly said aloud.

The squash was silent in the dark.

Other villagers scoff. They argue.

"That squash's real," Ted said.

A plant expert has been consulted, and his opinion is that plants don't like us cross pollinating them and messing with their genes, and they're going to rebel. He asks, perhaps rhetorically, "What would you say if I told you I believe the plant kingdom morally disapproves of what man is doing to the world?"

The dude he's talking to does not have a reply to that, but asks, "Is it possible they could control the weather?"

The plant expert is experimenting on trays of bean sprouts to see if plants have memory. He notices that the plants are responding faster, which means...

"They would not only be able to remember, but see into the future as well."

What.

In the gentle hum emerging from the air conditioning he failed to hear the tiny rustling sound from the rows of bean sprouts, nor did he detect the small, whispery note of menace it contained.

He dies mysteriously off-page surrounded by his bean sprouts, the author presumably having failed to come up with a plausible way the bean sprouts could have killed him and so deciding to leave it to our imagination. Usually this is a good technique in horror, but in this case my imagination fails.

What are used bookshops for if not for discovering utterly batshit, extremely earnest first novels by geologists turned advertising executives who want to convey their Very Important message about respecting the environment and particularly plants, via the medium of... this:

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This message would probably be more effective if the author knew anything about... anything, really, but basic geography would help. A tragic backstory involving a prophetic villager finding an oil-slicked penguin falls utterly flat given that he says he found it while on a trip to the coast.

THERE ARE NO WILD PENGUINS IN ENGLAND.

Back to the squash, Charlie freaks out and chops it up, then buries it like a murder victim. This prompts the plants to rustle scarily to make him run, then stick out a root so he trips and hits his head against a rock.

The prophetic dude muses, "I wonder what you did to that squash, Charlie. I wonder how you offended it."

In more menacing behavior - this is described in the most ominous terms - a rose bush pricks a woman's finger. Twice.

( Then the plants REALLY get mad! )

I paid $3.00 for this and it was well worth it.

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Popsicle Poll!

I snagged an optometrist appointment in Fresno. And you know what that means:

A return trip to the Palace of Paletas!

Here are my popsicle reviews to date:

Snickers: A+. Creamy vanilla with generous chunks of frozen Snickers.
Strawberry cheesecake: A. Creamy cheesecake ice cream with tasty if gory-looking streaks of strawberry sauce.
Watermelon: A. Pure frozen watermelon juice, cleverly made to resemble a rind-and-all slice by means of a layer of vanilla icecream and a layer of green lemon sorbet at the stick end.
Coconut Water: A. A more delicate flavor than coconut ice cream; refreshing, not too sweet.
Whole pecan: B. A slightly too-lavish hand with the pecans unbalanced the experience.
Horchata: B. Fine but I've had better horchata paletas.

I reproduce their entire popsicle menu below in the form of a poll. Vote here for which popsicles I should bring back and cram into my freezer! Cut for length. ( Read more... )

Please support your reasoning in comments.

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