Beginning my triennial Farscape rewatch. It was really nice to hear Crichton’s voice.
Meljean Brooks, The Iron Duke: Okay, there’s now a zombie steampunk subgenre, which I didn’t know. The Mongol Horde, aided by its nanomachines, overran most of Europe, turning the Continentals who didn’t escape to the New World into zombies and the residents of England into buggers, non-zombies controlled by their nanomachines and often modified (limbs replaced with mining implements, etc.). Buggers were subject to Horde-triggered mating frenzies before the Iron Duke destroyed the tower that controlled the nanomachines, allowing the expulsion of the Mongols. He's the Iron Duke because his body has been extra modified; though he looks the same, there's metal running under his skin, making him very heavy (and making me wonder about his dick, which is suitably large but apparently not subject to the same modifications). The product of one such Frenzy, with a Mongol father, is our protagonist Mina, a detective inspector who faces substantial racial prejudice in the post-revolutionary order. The story starts with a murder on the Iron Duke’s grounds and rockets along from there, with lots of worldbuilding and conspiracy and airships and automata. And zombies.
However, the coercion in the romance went past my tolerance level for het. As![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightgetsin said, it’s the reluctant woman/determined man trope, where he’s confident that he’s going to “have” her and the romance involves his definition of “having” changing as he realizes that he’s never going to be done with her, as meanwhile she falls in love with him. So he’s fine with using job-related pressure and blackmail to get her, and also he’s sure that her no doesn’t mean no. But underneath it he’s a good guy! This produces the following scenario: she doesn’t want to have sex and says so; though he is not impaired, he confidently ignores her “no” and fucks her; she has an orgasm; he realizes that she is truly devastated by the sex and that her “no” was serious and he feels really bad about it. She forgives him. Then, they negotiate the boundaries of her consent. A little late, was my feeling.
J. Michael Stracyznski & Shane Davis, Superman: Earth One: Excellent premise wars with rushed execution. This version of Clark Kent really, really just wants to take care of his mom, and he’s willing to use his powers to do so, coming to Metropolis as a young adult to explore careers from football player to lab researcher to journalist; he doesn’t want to be a hero. All too soon (and I really mean that—the scenario is barely in place), a planetary-scale threat forces him to defend his adoptive home. Which, among other things, means that his choices are (1) be a hero or (2) die, so his choice of (1) is not exactly dramatic despite all the shouting.
Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #19: This collection (graphic novel?) starts with a fairly standard failed-colonization-of-Mars, unreliable-narrator story that I found moved into the genuinely creepy category with Ware’s cartoonish figures and persistent use of circles within panels. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the frame story, about a shy man who escapes into the world of pulp sf while carrying on an affair with a female coworker in a repressive fifties environment, much at all. Yes, the misogyny and alienation of his life carried over into the misogyny and alienation of his fiction. ... Okay? I’m not fond of reading only to be appalled by the viewpoint characters.
Meljean Brooks, The Iron Duke: Okay, there’s now a zombie steampunk subgenre, which I didn’t know. The Mongol Horde, aided by its nanomachines, overran most of Europe, turning the Continentals who didn’t escape to the New World into zombies and the residents of England into buggers, non-zombies controlled by their nanomachines and often modified (limbs replaced with mining implements, etc.). Buggers were subject to Horde-triggered mating frenzies before the Iron Duke destroyed the tower that controlled the nanomachines, allowing the expulsion of the Mongols. He's the Iron Duke because his body has been extra modified; though he looks the same, there's metal running under his skin, making him very heavy (and making me wonder about his dick, which is suitably large but apparently not subject to the same modifications). The product of one such Frenzy, with a Mongol father, is our protagonist Mina, a detective inspector who faces substantial racial prejudice in the post-revolutionary order. The story starts with a murder on the Iron Duke’s grounds and rockets along from there, with lots of worldbuilding and conspiracy and airships and automata. And zombies.
However, the coercion in the romance went past my tolerance level for het. As
lightgetsin said, it’s the reluctant woman/determined man trope, where he’s confident that he’s going to “have” her and the romance involves his definition of “having” changing as he realizes that he’s never going to be done with her, as meanwhile she falls in love with him. So he’s fine with using job-related pressure and blackmail to get her, and also he’s sure that her no doesn’t mean no. But underneath it he’s a good guy! This produces the following scenario: she doesn’t want to have sex and says so; though he is not impaired, he confidently ignores her “no” and fucks her; she has an orgasm; he realizes that she is truly devastated by the sex and that her “no” was serious and he feels really bad about it. She forgives him. Then, they negotiate the boundaries of her consent. A little late, was my feeling.J. Michael Stracyznski & Shane Davis, Superman: Earth One: Excellent premise wars with rushed execution. This version of Clark Kent really, really just wants to take care of his mom, and he’s willing to use his powers to do so, coming to Metropolis as a young adult to explore careers from football player to lab researcher to journalist; he doesn’t want to be a hero. All too soon (and I really mean that—the scenario is barely in place), a planetary-scale threat forces him to defend his adoptive home. Which, among other things, means that his choices are (1) be a hero or (2) die, so his choice of (1) is not exactly dramatic despite all the shouting.
Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #19: This collection (graphic novel?) starts with a fairly standard failed-colonization-of-Mars, unreliable-narrator story that I found moved into the genuinely creepy category with Ware’s cartoonish figures and persistent use of circles within panels. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the frame story, about a shy man who escapes into the world of pulp sf while carrying on an affair with a female coworker in a repressive fifties environment, much at all. Yes, the misogyny and alienation of his life carried over into the misogyny and alienation of his fiction. ... Okay? I’m not fond of reading only to be appalled by the viewpoint characters.
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