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Arrow and fiction
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intothespin got me to watch Arrow, and I have to admit I’m as charmed by Felicity Smoak as everyone else is. (Bonus: she’s Jewish! And I love how forthright she is about what she’s going to do for Christmas, just as much as I love how forthright Diggle is about the effect of his race on the meaning of his role.) I found it hilarious that “IT girl” turns out to be “chemical analysis girl” etc.—it’s like they have a big box labeled “sciencey stuff!” and Felicity does it all. I also love that she put in exercise equipment for Oliver because she likes to watch him work out; she could not be more of a fangirl. They clearly did the art on the first season DVDs before they realized she was going to be a fan favorite; she doesn’t even appear. The one thing that always makes me snort, though, is when Oliver pulls out his bow when his assailant is like six feet away. Really? I mean, I know he’s an archer. But really?
So where is all the post-S2 finale Felicity/Oliver where she turns out to be quite capable of supporting them, albeit not quite in the style to which he is accustomed, with her app development skills? (I could also do Malcolm/Oliver hatesex.)
Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky, Sex Criminals Vol. 1: One Weird Trick: When Suzie has an orgasm, time stops for the rest of the world, and she can move around freely while everyone else is frozen, until she’s recovered. (Her early attempts to figure out whether orgasm is like this for everyone provide some of the funniest bits, given our sex-mystifying culture.) Eventually, she meets Jon, who has the same power but is much more maladjusted; they decide to start robbing banks to get money to save the library Suzie works at; then the Sex Police get after them. The beginning concept is so strong that some wobbles of execution/plausibility even spotting them a lot of worldbuilding are tolerable, though I sort of wonder where it can go from here. I will probably find out.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, eds. Rose Fox & Daniel José Older: Short stories from authors such as Sofia Samatar, Tananarive Due, Nnedi Okorafor, drawing on many traditions. Many of the stories are set in contexts of Western colonization or chattel slavery and its aftermath; there’s nothing from after 1945, I think. Within their communities, most of the protagonists are outsiders for various reasons (sex, gender, religion, being a ghost, being sister to a dragon, etc.). These are generally stories of small victories, people drawing on their various traditions for strength and survival, so if that’s your thing, you’ll get quite a variety here.
Michael Marshall, We Are Here: Michael Marshall the thriller writer is less to my taste than Michael Marshall Smith the spec-fic writer, but I keep buying because he is in general such a good writer, full of little cutting gems. This book, though it had the general technical quality I expect, is the first one I’m not keeping. One of the protagonists of an earlier book, still pretty shell-shocked from those events, is now in NYC, eking out an existence with a serious girlfriend and a dead-end job. When his girlfriend asks him to investigate whether a member of her book club is being stalked, he’s drawn into an extremely dangerous confrontation with people who walk through the city almost unseen. Rationally, I know that it’s okay for characters not to be genre savvy, but this guy already survived a previous Marshall book! He knows that there are creepy conspiracies from beyond the bounds of conventional science that occasionally kill people! So I wanted him to twig to the situation (the people in this underworld are not what they seem) earlier than he did. On the other hand, I liked that we heard several competing explanations of what these people were, each of which made sense from the perspective of the person offering the explanation. But that delay in figuring things out, combined with the fact that all the characters were almost relentlessly petty—capable of doing good things for other people in extreme moments, but otherwise absorbed in their own lives and pains, too much like me—makes this a book that does not represent what I think of as Marshall’s best.
Robin Hobb, Fool’s Assassin: Review copy. OK, I feel I need to chat with other people who’ve read the book about this. I’ve been away from Hobb for several years—the fanfic prejudice, plus the fact that I just couldn’t much enjoy the books with the river serpents in them, put her low on my priority list. But I really enjoyed the initial Fool books (until that weird no-homo stuff at the very end) and I couldn’t resist a chance to revisit Fitz. This is very definitely a book for fans of the original series, in that it is almost all about the texture of Fitz’s life and not very much happens for almost all of the book. Also, the Fool is absent for most of it, though Fitz periodically moons over him. Fitz is in retirement; he and his wife have an unusual daughter late in life; his former mentor sends various other troublesome people to hang out with him in obscurity. The thing that gets the plot moving is a prophecy about an “unexpected child,” supposedly the Fool’s. As various people try to find the Fool’s missing son, the answer is so apparent that it is actively annoying that no one in the narrative figures it out. (This is what I want to chat about: when did other readers get it?) Also, Fitz’s daughter picks up some of the narration about halfway through. She is plausibly self-involved and somewhat self-pitying, and if I were closer to the me who really enjoyed young, misunderstood narrators with special powers/destinies I would probably have enjoyed her more. She did grow on me over time; her occasional pettiness made perfect sense, even as she inherited some of Fitz’s most annoying traits. At the very end, a sudden change requires a sequel and portends more suffering for Fitz.
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Bless his heart, but Oliver is by far not the brains of that outfit. On a good day, he'll make top five. (Felicity, Sarah, John, Barry if you count him as part of that crew still.) But in his defense, he's aware that he's the pretty one. Also in his defense, he's still smarter than Roy.
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I'm already mulling Felicity fixing the paperwork so that he keeps the bar, which he arguably could look like he was managing.