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Eileen Gunn, Stable Strategies and Others: This slender collection of sf stories features lots of outrageous occurrences treated as ordinary practice, like the opening story “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” in which the protagonist accepts bioengineering to give herself insect traits she hopes will enable her to succeed in business. It’s not Kafka, but there is a metamorphosis and a surprise ending. I liked best the stories that had the rhythm of fairy tales, sort of like Kelly Link but with more human sympathy, inserting the sf into the myth: “Once, some time ago, ... there was a girl named in her language for a kind of lichen that clings to rocks near the shore. Now in our time, it would be considered odd to name your child after lichen, and perhaps it was so then. But her parents never offered her an explanation, and it’s much too late for one now.
“Lichen lived with her mother and father and brothers at the edge of the woods on the shore of a large, quiet arm of the ocean. The woods sheltered them, the water fed them, and small electronic devices told them stories.”
I like the way the small electronic devices sneak up on you.
Stephen King, The Colorado Kid: Some people will dislike this book about a dead man found on the Maine shore because it doesn't really have an ending. I disliked it because King, the high priest of cultural references, screwed the pooch on the ones here: The decedent, who died in 1980, apparently went to a Starbucks the day before he died (there weren't any in Colorado, and anyway the store didn't use the name Starbucks until 1987). He and his wife once rented From Russia With Love at a Blockbuster (founded in the mid-1980s); moreover, they'd have had to be fairly wealthy or early adopters to have a VCR at that point (3% of households in 1980, according to a dissertation I read), and they might have had difficulty even with the hardware, because though there were 900 rental stores in the nation I’m not sure how many were to be found in a little town in Colorado. I didn't check whether Bond films were available on tape then, though it's vaguely possible. These errors weaken one of King's strongest suits, which is verisimilitude through branded detail; more, they're unnecessary, since the dead man could have gone to a coffee shop or a diner and he and his wife could have seen the film at a rep theater. Maybe you could construe these as errors by the narrators, who are telling the story of the mysterious death to a young journalist, but as far as I can tell we're supposed to accept them as perfectly reliable. I just didn't feel like his heart was in it.
Mary Oliver, Blue Iris:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
geekturnedvamp gave me this book of poetry about flowers. Usually I like my poets precise and brutal -- "They were small and could not hope for help and no help came" or even "He is going to show them/how a professional does it" (side note: that poem made me want to write a story about Lex deciding to be Bad, but then I realized that the poem already said everything I could possibly say, much better than I could ever say it). Oliver is precise and gentle, with small sharp observations, though the sharpness is more the way a leaf is outlined against a tree in fall morning light than a cutting sort of thing. Oh, I have no idea how to review poetry; here's a bit from "Skunk Cabbage":
Keith DeCandido, Serenity (novelization): Nothing to see here. Padded with scenes from Firefly, it’s a faithful and unrevealing account of the film. If you’re like me, and hear the characters saying the lines, you’d be better off with the screenplay, which would offer less distraction in the way of narration (if that’s the right word). I like the Buffy script books and will get the one for Serenity, but the tie-in novel didn’t work for me.
Once I accept that I can't really do anything but care for the boy while Z. is away, life is okay -- I finished the Profit DVDs, including all the commentaries, where the creators twice point out that you have to be really hard-core to be listening to them. I'm proud to say I watched Profit for the ten seconds it aired on Fox; I guess I was ahead of my time, too. Now I'm on to Firefly again, and pondering the great philosophical question: when the Rivkid spits up my milk, whose bodily fluid does that count as?
“Lichen lived with her mother and father and brothers at the edge of the woods on the shore of a large, quiet arm of the ocean. The woods sheltered them, the water fed them, and small electronic devices told them stories.”
I like the way the small electronic devices sneak up on you.
Stephen King, The Colorado Kid: Some people will dislike this book about a dead man found on the Maine shore because it doesn't really have an ending. I disliked it because King, the high priest of cultural references, screwed the pooch on the ones here: The decedent, who died in 1980, apparently went to a Starbucks the day before he died (there weren't any in Colorado, and anyway the store didn't use the name Starbucks until 1987). He and his wife once rented From Russia With Love at a Blockbuster (founded in the mid-1980s); moreover, they'd have had to be fairly wealthy or early adopters to have a VCR at that point (3% of households in 1980, according to a dissertation I read), and they might have had difficulty even with the hardware, because though there were 900 rental stores in the nation I’m not sure how many were to be found in a little town in Colorado. I didn't check whether Bond films were available on tape then, though it's vaguely possible. These errors weaken one of King's strongest suits, which is verisimilitude through branded detail; more, they're unnecessary, since the dead man could have gone to a coffee shop or a diner and he and his wife could have seen the film at a rep theater. Maybe you could construe these as errors by the narrators, who are telling the story of the mysterious death to a young journalist, but as far as I can tell we're supposed to accept them as perfectly reliable. I just didn't feel like his heart was in it.
Mary Oliver, Blue Iris:
geekturnedvamp gave me this book of poetry about flowers. Usually I like my poets precise and brutal -- "They were small and could not hope for help and no help came" or even "He is going to show them/how a professional does it" (side note: that poem made me want to write a story about Lex deciding to be Bad, but then I realized that the poem already said everything I could possibly say, much better than I could ever say it). Oliver is precise and gentle, with small sharp observations, though the sharpness is more the way a leaf is outlined against a tree in fall morning light than a cutting sort of thing. Oh, I have no idea how to review poetry; here's a bit from "Skunk Cabbage": But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again—a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
Refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
Keith DeCandido, Serenity (novelization): Nothing to see here. Padded with scenes from Firefly, it’s a faithful and unrevealing account of the film. If you’re like me, and hear the characters saying the lines, you’d be better off with the screenplay, which would offer less distraction in the way of narration (if that’s the right word). I like the Buffy script books and will get the one for Serenity, but the tie-in novel didn’t work for me.
Once I accept that I can't really do anything but care for the boy while Z. is away, life is okay -- I finished the Profit DVDs, including all the commentaries, where the creators twice point out that you have to be really hard-core to be listening to them. I'm proud to say I watched Profit for the ten seconds it aired on Fox; I guess I was ahead of my time, too. Now I'm on to Firefly again, and pondering the great philosophical question: when the Rivkid spits up my milk, whose bodily fluid does that count as?
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