Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 99

This is a Good Book Thursday, April 22, 2021

Just finished Crazy Rich Asians (yes, I am the last to read it) and the Murderbot short, and eh. Murderbot is always fun, but it read like some of Aaronovitch’s shorts, not really constructed as a story, more like outtakes. Still fun to read. Also some Michael Gilbert short stories that were well-constructed, and parts of Sh*t My Dad Says, which was funny, probably because I didn’t sit down and read it all the way through; it’s the kind of book you read a section in, laugh, and then go do something else.

What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Krissie and I both need clean offices (she’s organizing the office she has, I’m making the living room into mine), so we agreed to start with pictures of the chaos. (No, you can’t see them, we have some pride.) Then we both agreed that we were comfortable where we were–she in her LaZBoy in Vermont and me in the guest room bed in NJ–so maybe later for the pictures . . . . I’m thinking this is going to take awhile.

What did you do this week?

Happiness is Vintage Photography

Every now and then I come across vintage images that make me reconsider all my assumptions about the past, that make me realize that not only is the past not stodgy, many of our forbearers were actively weird. My fave is the woman who looks like me sitting on a bed with a bear, but even fairly tame vintage clip art often has an edge of insanity to it. The image at left is from the Graphics Fairy, a great site full of free graphics from the past, but there are a lot more sources once you start to go down the rabbit hole of vintage image, especially if you google for “weird vintage photos.”

Vintage photography makes me smile.

What made you happy this week?

This is my fave:

Argh Re-Reads: Martha Wells’ Murderbot Books

First, two confessions: One, I’ve only read one Martha Wells’ novel that wasn’t a Murderbot. Two, I have read all of the Murderbot novels plus the last novel well over twelve times (I stopped counting then) and I’ll re-read them another twelve times at least. Wells is a terrific writer so I’m sure all of her books are terrific, but I am a Murderbot fan (to put it mildly) so this is a Murderbot post.

I devoured science fiction in junior high and high school, so my background in the genre is Asimov, Norton, and Sheckley. (I almost drove off the road one afternoon when my pal Alisa Kwitney told me her dad was Robert Sheckley; I loved Robert Sheckley’s work. Our Laura Resnick is Mike Resnick’s daughter. Writing is a very small community.). But then I moved on to mystery and did my first master’s thesis on that (it was terrible) and then working on my PhD I finally took a good look at romance and settled in for the long haul. So when I kept hearing about Murderbot, I thought, Robots that kill, uh, no, and moved on. Then Tor offered the first four novellas for free, and readers I trusted were so enthusiastic that I took Tor up on its offer (hey, FREE) and met Murderbot and loved it from the first line:

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels on the company satellite.”

A character that has a choice between mass murder and watching stories and picks stories: that’s my kind of robot.

Murderbot is a construct, machine parts inextricably combined with cloned human parts, a mash-up that leaves it in constant existential crisis because, as it explains, its not two halves working together, its one whole in conflict with itself. Designed to augment computer services to humans working on strange planets, it has decision-making capibilities but is in total thrall to the Company, which can break it down for parts if it doesn’t obey orders. (This is where I should say that calling Murderbot “it” is dehumanizing and bothers me because Murderbot is in my mind entirely and delightfully human, but it has no gender identity which it’s pretty forceful about, so “it” it is.). Then one day, the humans who have taken a contract with it as part of the equipment are hacked, and the hack goes wrong, and Murderbot, helpless to refuse an order, murders fifty-seven people. Shortly after that, it gives itself a name–Murderbot–hacks its governor so it’s no longer controlled by outside forces, and quietly begins life as rogue but still obedient AI. It’s just not going to kill anybody because of human error again. That’s all back story, neatly taken care of in the first novella and built on later. Have I mentioned that Wells is a terrific writer?

There are many things I love about this character–its self-deprecation, its wry humor, its character arc, its essential goodness–but one of things I love most is that its character arc is fueled by the TV series it watches constantly, mostly adventure shows, in conjunction with what it learns by reluctantly interacting with humans. (Okay, it doesn’t watch TV, it downloads the series directly into its memory bank, but it’s pretty much watching Battlestar Galactica while munching metaphorical popcorn every chance it gets.) Its education is sketchy since the Company cheaps out on that, but watching thousands of story hours about heroic humans in tense situations has made it, by osmosis, a competence porn hero in its own way, fed up with the clusterfuckery around it but dedicated to preserving life (or as it says in exasperation when it realizes how bad the situation is in the first novella, “I’ve got four perfectly good humans here and I didn’t want them to get killed”). It knows the story series are ridiculous, not realistic in any way, and it appreciates that because its had enough reality in its life (yeah, me, too, Murderbot, that’s why I read fiction). Another thing I love about Murderbot: it takes in its experiences across the books, examines them carefully, and rejects anything it considers bad code and accepts the useful, even if its uncomfortable. It’s a beautiful character arc for a fascinating character that just happens to be Artificial Intelligence that’s also human from its opaque helmet to its manufactured feet.

“All Systems Red” (novella):
Murderbot is standing around bored on a planet whose name it doesn’t know and doesn’t care about when a monster erupts from the bottom of a crater and snatches one of the people Murderbot is responsible for. Murderbot immediately leaps into the monster’s mouth, saves the woman who is horribly injured, and takes her and her stunned-and-going-into-shock partner to safety. That’s in the first two pages. The rest of the novella is about Murderbot working with the survey leader, Dr. Mensah, and her small crew to get the hell off the planet before another survey team, dubbed EvilSurvey, can murder them all. It’s a great adventure story, a great introduction to a great character, but above all the story of Murderbot integrating into a group of very human people it comes to trust (some of them) and who come to understand it as one of them. In other words, it’s my kryptonite: a team story with a competence porn protagonist who has a lot to learn and learns it. In fact, the entire series is about Murderbot’s character arc, while fighting off really evil, greedy bad guys and defending the humans its been hired to protect. No wonder I’ve read these books over a dozen times. (This novella is $3.99 right now on Amazon. You should buy it. No, I don’t know Martha Wells. I just love Murderbot.)

“Artificial Condition” (novella):
Murderbot is now on its own, traveling the galaxy but hitching rides on empty ships with robot pilots, giving them access to its tremendous collection of stories (35,000 hours worth) as payment for the ride. That goes well until it meets the ship Perihelion, who allows it on board, takes off, and then reveals itself to be an AI of tremendous power. After its first moments of terror, Murderbot calls it “Asshole Research Transport” or “ART” for short, and while the story is about Murderbot researching what made him kill fifty-seven people and also about saving very young programmers from an evil, greedy employer, what it’s really about for me is the beginnings of its relationship with ART, a testy, wrangling, exasperated interchange that evolves into mutual respect and connection. It’s probably pushing it to describe it as a romance, but that’s how I see it: two intelligences connecting on both an intellectual and emotional level. Murderbot can deny it, but later on, everybody else will see it. And it’s great.

“Rogue Protocol” (novella):
Having put the mystery of the massacre behind him, or at least understanding it now, Murderbot secretly hitches a ride on a transport going to a site last worked by the EvilSurvey company that tried to kill him and his team in the first novella; its looking for evidence that EvilSurvey did something horrible here, too. But when it reaches the planet, it realizes the new team there is about to be wiped out by treachery and greed–Murderbot sees a lot of treachery and greed–so it makes friends with a little bot named Miki that has bonded with its team, as they have with it. Murderbot tries to dismiss it as a pet bot, but the relationship there is clearly more than that, and while it’s dealing with this new input into its own confused response to its original team, it has to keep moving to save Miki’s team. As in every Murderbot story, the action is non-stop, the plot is twisty, but the real power is in Murderbot, doing what it does best while wondering why the hell it’s doing that.

“Exit Strategy” (novella):
Murderbot’s been keeping an eye on the news feed to find out what’s happening to his first team from “All Systems Red” and especially on what’s happening with EvilSurvey when it sees a newsfeed item that makes it suspicious that Dr. Mensah has been kidnapped. So of course it goes to save her, meeting up with the rest of team and coming full circle from its beginnings in “All Systems Red.” Again, exciting, funny, and full of heart, with the kicker that Murderbot finally accepts that it is part of a group it truly cares about and (so much worse) that truly cares about it. Great character arc over four novellas.

Tor is not stupid; having given me the first four novellas for free, it informed me that the next book was a novel (YAY!) and it wasn’t cheap. I didn’t care, I loved Murderbot so much I bought it without blinking. And it was marvelous.

Network Effect (novel)
I remember thinking at one point while reading the novellas, “I wish these were novels.” When I finally got to the novel, I could see why Wells had started with novellas: Network Effect isn’t just a terrific story, it keeps its narrative clean and its subtext layered and complex as all hell, and while I devoured it the first time as a reader, later re-reads evoked in me that greatest of writer reactions: “God, I wish I could write like this.” Every time I read Network Effect, I see more layers. It’s just brilliant. Murderbot is back with its team, and as the story opens, its just been shot (no worries) and has fallen off a boat into the water (really, no worries) and has swum around to board the other boat from which the shot was fired (the people on that boat should worry) and things move rapidly on from there, Murderbot working with its team to escape danger, another job well done– Oh, wait. Murderbot and Dr. Mensah’s teenage daughter have been snatched from space by an evil, greedy unknown entity and now are captive aboard . . . Listen, this plot moves fast (that’s probably the first chapter) and the twists keeps coming, but all you need to know is that Murderbot meets new people and comes up against a powerful evil, greedy force, and oh yeah, ART’s back. I love this book.

Fugitive Telemetry (novel)
The newest entry in the series drops on Monday; I pre-ordered it last May, and I cannot wait.

Look, I know the Murderbots are expensive, but the first one is $3.99 right now, so the entry level is affordable, and great fiction is priceless. I think of it as cost-per-read, and I’ve read them so many times I’m down to pennies a re-read. Start with the first one. One of two things will happen: You’ll decide they don’t appeal to you or justify the price and move on to another author or you’ll be so hooked you’ll work your way through the novellas and the novels and then start over again at the beginning. Or maybe that’s just me. No, it’s not just me, Murderbot is really that good.

I’m re-reading them all right now, having finished my Dick Francis binge, but mostly, I’m just getting set up for Monday’s release. There’s a murder on Murderbot’s new home planet (the planet his team lives on) and of course Murderbot’s exasperated–“No, I didn’t kill the dead human. If I had, I wouldn’t dump the body in the station mall”–and I’ve got my fingers crossed that the whole team and ART will be back . . .

Hurry up, Monday.

This is a Good Book Thursday, April 15, 2021

I’ve been reading even more than usual–another Dick Francis (Wild Horses), a romance novel that annoyed me, the first two Murderbot novellas again, one of my WiPs to see if I still thought it was a worth finishing (yes, it is). I also have a stack of housecleaning books that I’ve gathered on the theory that “If I buy it, I will clean,” which turns out not to be true. Oh, well.

What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, April 14, 2021

I fell down the Dick Francis rabbit hole of my own making and read several of his books last week. That severely cut into my cleaning time. Well, you know, “Gee, should I try to shovel some of this mess out the door or read a book about good men fighting evil with horses in the background.” Thank god I don’t like alcohol; I have the resistance of wet Kleenex. But I did get stuff done, progress is being made, and I’m almost out of the Francis books I own, plus if I want to do another Re-Read post, I have to move on to another author, so I think I’m out of the Francis woods, as soon as I finish Longshot. It’s about a writer. That’s almost like working, right?

What did you do this week?

Happiness is Talking About Books

I have so enjoyed the comments about Dick Francis this week. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to talk about books I love with people who love them, too. I’m going to really enjoy doing the Re-Read posts and enjoy even more the comments and conversation.

What made you happy this week?

Argh Re-Reads: Dick Francis

So I’ve been thinking about a new series for here and the comments in the last post about Dick Francis decided it: I’m going to do every-now-and-then posts about my re-reads, one author per post, starting with the Dick Francis post I took down because it was a draft. Basically, it’ll be a paragraph about why I love these authors, whatever other info I have about their lives and writing, and then a Top Five Re-Reads with annotations. That’ll be fun for me and the comments should be interesting since we can talk about one author in depth. Some of my other re-reads will probably be Pratchett, Gilbert, Heyer, Allingham, Christie, Stout, Wells (although only her Murderbots, so maybe not), Aaronovitch and . . . well, there are a lot. REALLY looking forward to the conversations in the comments.

And now, Dick Francis.

Dick Francis is a comfort read for me even though he writes some pretty violent stories. Francis writes a world of honest men driven to risk their lives, often by racing horses, who find their lives in even more danger because of insanely evil men who need to destroy them. This is not my genre. And yet, Francis will forever be one of my favorite writers. The moral underpinnings of his work are so strong, his English settings so vivid, his low-key protagonists so skilled that I go back to them again and again. He gets you first with outrage–these are such good people, why is somebody doing these lousy things to them?–and holds you with competence porn and decency. His worlds are bound by justice and retribution, his heroes sadder but wiser, his books reassuring in a chaotic world: Good will always prevail in a Dick Francis story. Also he could write really, really well. (I tried a couple written with or by his son, Felix, and something’s missing in them, but that may be just me.) There are a few that I can’t reread because of personal issues (well, he wrote over forty books, he was bound to hit some sore spots), but they’re all very well-written first person narratives. I don’t think he ever wrote a bad book.

One of the reasons, I think, is that he wrote from experience and did exhaustive research. His books about flying came from both his experience as a WWII pilot (and from his wife Mary’s extensive experience as a pilot). After the RAF he became a champion jockey, winning over 350 races, many as Queen Elizabeth’s jockey. When he retired, he wrote his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, and became a sports journalist, a job he kept for sixteen years. Then in 1962 published his first novel, Dead Cert. He was 42.

I keep going back to that. RAF pilot, champion jockey to the Queen, serious journalist, all before he was 42. I mean, I started writing at 41, and all I have to show for the previous four decades is a lot of teaching. At least I now understand why his heroes are all competence porn made flesh. And then there’s this bit from Wikipedia: “He regularly produced a novel a year for the next 38 years, missing only 1998 (during which he published a short-story collection).” Show-off. Not only that, he wrote them from January to May. That’s five months. He had to have them done by May because that’s when his publisher came to get them. I had to lie down for awhile at that point overwhelmed by jealousy and shame.

Francis did have help: his wife Mary did all the research, among other things becoming a pilot for Flying Finish and starting her own air taxi service for Rat Race, and learning photography for Reflex. Francis said he would have been happy to have her name on the covers of their books. She must have been an amazing woman. They both said it was love at first sight, which I think explains why so many of his subplot romances are so quick; he was drawing on experience again.

My first Francis was High Stakes, about a rich toy designer, great at Rube-Goldberg-like interlocking toys, who owns racehorses but doesn’t know much about them; when he finds out he’s being cheated, the cheaters try to ruin him, and he defeats them with an ingenious plan of interlocking parts, just like the toys he designs. There’s a nice subtle romantic subplot, but the main plot is the classic Francis Good Honest Man against Greed and Evil, with excellent comeuppance at the end and justice for all. It was a great start to a decades long Francis Re-Read.

My Top Five Francis Re-Reads (in alphabetical order):

Hot Money
Ian Pembroke, champion jockey, is the son of a multi-millionaire who disowned him when he pointed out that the woman he was about to take as his fifth wife was a mistake. The marriage turned out badly alienating even more the eight now grown children of Malcolm Pembroke’s five wives. So it’s a surprise when Malcolm calls his son out of the blue because he needs somebody beside him he can trust, and disowned or not, he trusts Ian. The problem? Somebody’s trying to kill him. As Ian navigates some savage family jealousies and thwarts more attempts on Malcolm’s life, he gets to know his father as an adult and reaches out to the rest of his family to try to the heal the breaches caused by past betrayals, real and imagined, before the killer can take Malcolm out. It’s a book about how families fragment and heal, populated by vivid characters, and just enough racing that you know it’s a Francis.

Ten-Pound Penalty
Benedict Juliard is just seventeen when his distant but caring father calls him to help him win a political seat, a seat that a bad guy does not want him to win. The book covers a lot of time–ten years?–during which the threats to Ben and his father ebb and flow as Ben grows up. The political details in this are light but interesting, the characters vivid, but I think I just like the father/son relationship here, and I really like Ben’s character arc from schoolboy to skilled professional who’s nobody to mess with.

Break-In and Bolt
In Break-In, Kit Fielding was raised to love horses and hate Allerdecks, a family rivalry that makes the Montagues and Capulets look like buddies. Now Kit’s grown up and a champion jockey, and his twin sister Holly has married Bobby Allerdeck, all three of them rejecting the feud to the disgust of both families. But that kind of hatred has deep roots; somebody’s trying to ruin Bobby and Holly, and Kit goes to help while still riding horses for his favorite owner, a princess with a niece named Danielle he’d like to know better.

In Bolt, Kit and Danielle are engaged, but something’s gone very wrong, and Kit doesn’t know what it is, While he’s trying not to lose the woman he loves, the princess and her husband are targeted by a cruel and greedy classis Francis villain, and Kit pitches in again to save the people he cares about.

I think the fact that Kit is such a smart guy coupled with his deep love for the people around him, puts his books on this list, but it doesn’t hurt that the plots are nicely twisted and that Danielle is an equally smart capable character with a demanding job she does very well. Yes, I know this is two books, but they’re about the same guy and Bolt finishes what Break-In couldn’t, that stupid family feud.

The Edge
Tor Kelsey is part of racing security, the eyes of the guy in charge, who is sent to Canada when one of British racing’s most dangerous crooks buys his way onto a special racing cross-country train event that includes the cream of Canadian race horse owners, with a staged mystery as part of the entertainment. Tor’s a great character: he’s independently wealthy but he wants to work, he sees so much because he fades into the background, he pretty much likes everybody he meets, especially Nell, the woman in charge of the special trip. That romance is as understated as all of Francis’s subplots, but it’s more fun because they’re all stuck on the train together, Tor has to maintain his undercover identity, and Nell is busy every moment, so he has to be fast on his feet to make a connection before the train finishes crossing Canada. It always feels like the lightest of Francis’s mysteries to me; people still die but they’re all people we could spare, and the restricted setting of the train and the varied cast of characters (especially the actors in the mystery bit) mean this one is just fun.

The Danger
Andrew Douglas is a hostage negotiator with fifteen rescues under his belt when he’s called in to help recover top female jockey, Alessia Cenci. When things go horribly wrong at the ransom drop because the police don’t follow his orders, Andrew works overtime to find her and bring her home, which would be the end of the story for a lesser writer. Instead, Alessia needs help getting her nerve back, and Andrew is good at that, too, working to help her back to racing while being called into two more kidnappings, done by the same Big Bad who took Alessia. It’s a puzzle book, Andrew putting together clues to find the mastermind’s identity against the backdrop of negotiating the return of the new kidnap victims while dealing with the understandable insanity of those whose loved ones have been taken. Like all Francis heroes, Andrew is clever, kind, skilled, and determined to put the bad guy away.

But I could seriously have done ten or twelve top titles, Francis is just that good. I’m thinking Twice Shy, Rat Race, Decider, Straight . . . okay, Francis readers, tell me in the comments the ones I should have mentioned.

This is a Good Book Thursday, April 8, 2021

Last week, for the first time, I DNFed a book through rage. I’ve been reading romances between rereading mysteries, trying to see how things have changed in the genre (a lot, but that’s usual, romance reinvents itself constantly) and I tried a book that was turning out to be substandard from the beginning (gorgeous heroine, gorgeous hero, heroine needs rescued but is surprisingly sexually predatory for a wimpy girl) and then I got to the point where the hero had been falsely accused of rape. I HATE THIS TROPE.

The vast majority of rape accusations are not false, and yet this trope keeps showing up in romance novels, an anti-female patriarchal smirk of a defense in a feminist genre. This one makes me even madder than the hot professor trope (professors who sleep with their students are predators). But I soldiered on because I liked the hero until the turning point where the hero was under attack (verbally) and turned to the heroine for help, and all she had to do was say “No,” and she stayed silent. The premise was that she was Bambi, caught in the headlights, but at than point I was hoping the metaphorical car hit her so the hero could go find somebody with a spine and a working brain. I didn’t even flip to the end because I knew he’d forgive her.

The thing about a good romance is, the people in it have to deserve each other, stand up for each other, be there when times gets tough. No Big Misunderstandings, no “Because of my past, I couldn’t act/speak up/commit,” if they’re not pretty much all in by halfway through the book, there’s no time to build and test the relationship in the story space. But a character who abandons the person they supposedly love can’t . . .

I’m ranting, aren’t I? Okay forget that horrible book. Read Billy Crystal’s memoir, Still Foolin’ ‘Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys?. I had a bad week last week, but that was on Book Bub so I read the sample and laughed out loud three times. So I bought it and laughed out loud a lot more times. A lot of it is about getting older, and there’s a lot of name-dropping (well, it’s Billy Crystal, he’s met a lot of names) but it’s funny and warm, like a nice blanket that wraps around you. And makes you laugh out loud.

What did you read this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, April 8, 2021

I’ve been rereading Dick Francis lately, and I’ve been trying to figure out why he’s so compelling to me. He writes a completely patriarchal world of honest men driven to risk their lives, usually by racing horses, who find their lives in even more danger because of insanely evil men who need to destroy them. This is not my genre. And yet, Francis will forever be one of my favorite writers. The moral underpinnings of his work are so strong, his English settings so vivid, his low-key protagonists so skilled that I go back to them again and again. I think Hot Money is my favorite, but there’s also Ten Pound Penalty, and The Edge, and Straight, and Bolt (sequel to Break-In, also good) and my first Francis, High Stakes. He gets you first with outrage–these are such good people, why is somebody doing these lousy things to them?–and holds you with competence porn and decency. His worlds are bound by justice and retribution, his heroes sadder but wiser, his books reassuring in a chaotic world. Also he could write really, really well.

What did you read this week?