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I know this isn't the biggest plot conundrum in SV, but I am both proud of myself and a little sickened by the show because I figured something out: the crystals don't screech for Clark to find them unless People of Destiny are touching them, e.g., Lex and Lana. Otherwise Clark would know where the Shanghai crystal is now. It's not ... nonsensical, exactly, except that I don't see how Lana got to be a Person of Destiny (any more than I see how she got to be a Person of Convenient Cheongsam). She's not up on the cave wall like Naman, Seget, and Clark's destined love; she's entwined with the crystals because her crazy witch ancestor had a thing for them, right? (Side note: how sloppy does everyone involved with a scene have to get before the terms "ancestors" and "descendants" get confused on-air?) So the nonsense has merely taken a step back. If they were going to integrate Lana into the mythology, I think they needed to go deeper, much as I hate to say it – Jor-El should have given her the tattoo to signify her impending guardianship of Clark's SV secrets, or something.
And speaking of Jor-El, how much do I hate that Clark takes his warning at face value? Rather than even pathetically acknowledging the illogic in trusting him as Lana and Clark do with Lionel, Clark just runs off to do his dad's bidding. Because that's worked out so well thus far.
On the really cheap complaint side, I was saddened to see that Michael Rosenbaum successfully fought off the demand to take off his shirt this time. Jensen whatsisname had to take off his shirt; I don't see why MR didn't. Were they worried that two half-naked guys would look gay? 'Cause, fellows at the WB: that rainbow rose over SV long ago. Or should that be, "the really gay horses left the Barn of Solitude long ago"? (They were frightened off by what Clark & Lex were doing in there.)
Sheri S. Tepper, Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse: This is a short book, apparently the third in a series about Marianne, who has some sort of connection with Higher Powers that isn't all that important in this book. She's also heavily pregnant when she gets sucked into an errand for her dying aunt, an errand that involves returning a golden matchbox to a person who just might be connected to a rash of disappearances around the world. I didn't feel lost having missed the first two books, and it was interesting to read early Tepper, before she started to write long, but already concerned with gender roles and their reversals.
Johanna Sinisalo, Troll: A Love Story, translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas: Angel, a gay photographer, comes across some thugs beating up a baby troll – an endangered and highly elusive species whose physical similarities to humans are the result of coevolution rather than common ancestry – rescues the troll, hides it at home, and begins an emotional and sexual journey. The story is told by mixed POVs interspersed with scholarly texts on trolls; the language is a few degrees awry from lyrical, and I wonder if that's an effect of translation. It was a quick, compelling read about the ways in which people try to make others conform to their images of an ideal; the photographer's reaction to the troll is not, in the end, terribly different from other characters' reactions to Angel's beauty. Worth seeking out if you can deal with the suggestions of perversion – there's nothing explicit.
Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten: Further adventures of Thursday Next in Jurisfiction. In The Well of Lost Plots Thursday is pregnant, though her husband has been erased from history by the evil Goliath Corporation. Thursday is hiding out in an unpublished book in the Well while getting further training in Jurisfiction operations from Miss Havisham, but she can't seem to stay out of trouble – she even gets involved in rewriting the plot in her book in an attempt to save it from disassembly back into primordial text (the fate of many failed books). Something Rotten sees her back in the "real" world, or as real as a world obsessed with Jane Austen and fighting a centuries-long Crimean War can be. Thursday's husband is back, in fits and starts, but Goliath is making the move from corporation to religion as part of its attempt to fight an oddly specific prophecy, and if Thursday can't lead her cricket team to victory, the world will be destroyed. Wacky plots treated seriously are Fforde's stock in trade, along with satires of various book-related things – technology and eBooks in The Well of Lost Plots and Hamlet and its various adaptations in Something Rotten. I can't say I ever laughed out loud, but there were moments where the farce really worked. Sadly, the most farcical page in The Well of Lost Plots was probably the permissions page, where it appears that mere references to several books were made only with the copyright owners' permission. And people wonder why I don't think fair use is enough to protect transformative uses!
Sean Stewart, Cloud's End: This was the last Stewart I picked up, though there's still one more book out there. It's set in a world where dreams, or something like dreams, create islands, which eventually stabilize enough for people to colonize them. A small group of islanders travel from the edge of the world towards the center, where a war born of spirit-induced madness threatens to wreak horrible destruction. There are spirits who can become people and people who become spirits, including one who "twins" one of the main characters, taking on all her memories. As usual, the strength of the book is Stewart's lyrical writing. In general, I like his books best when they're set in a mundane world so the language gets its best contrast with the subject matter, but Cloud's End managed a good balance of mystical world-building with description of that world.
Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster: In a possibly postapocalyptic world, people are either mentally null slaves or psychically talented masters, though most of the latter are subordinate to other, stronger psychics. There are also mutated rebels who cannot be mentally controlled, though they can be killed by telekinesis – a good twist, I thought, having differential vulnerability. But the rebels are distant threats in this story of a young man coming into his own strengths, betrayed by his mentors, forced into the household of a man who will either break him or kill him. This was Butler's most brutal world yet, because the characters were all so compromised by their circumstances; not one of the main characters was moral or even aspired to morality. They never realized their own corruption and rarely acknowledged the horrors they inflicted on others. Even when the protagonist did a bit to mitigate the sufferings of some of the null slaves, it was mostly in his own self-interest and he didn't care enough to pursue the issue past the time their pain was shoved in his face. With all that, I didn't dislike the story – I just wished there had been some hope in it, but I could tell that hope would have been a lie.
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith's Brood: This is a collection of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, the story of three generations of survivors of a devastating nuclear war. After the war, the alien Oankali plucked a few surviving humans from Earth and began modifying them genetically as part of a program of "trade," involuntary as it was for the humans. Unaltered humans are not allowed to breed. Altered ones can only breed with the assistance of an Oankali. I found the first novel most compelling, because it was so good at evoking the protagonist's impossible choices (or lack thereof) when she's selected to be a liason between Oankali and other humans. Butler's theme is pretty much always "compromise," in all its meanings. I understood why the other humans hated and feared Lilith even as I also understood exactly why she went along with the Oankali plans. The later novels deal with more advanced Oankali-human hybrids, and while the Oankali remain alien and unable to understand certain things that seem obvious to humans, by the end the hybrids seem to be becoming different from Oankali or human before. The Oankali were frustrating, inflexible and inhuman, but that really worked; what they thought they had to learn from humans was not at all what the humans wanted them to learn, which is unusual for a first contact story.
So many comics to review! In the meantime: why are you not reading Ex Machina? Go, go, go – the first trade is out and Mitchell Hundred, God from the Machine and Mayor of New York City, awaits you!
And speaking of Jor-El, how much do I hate that Clark takes his warning at face value? Rather than even pathetically acknowledging the illogic in trusting him as Lana and Clark do with Lionel, Clark just runs off to do his dad's bidding. Because that's worked out so well thus far.
On the really cheap complaint side, I was saddened to see that Michael Rosenbaum successfully fought off the demand to take off his shirt this time. Jensen whatsisname had to take off his shirt; I don't see why MR didn't. Were they worried that two half-naked guys would look gay? 'Cause, fellows at the WB: that rainbow rose over SV long ago. Or should that be, "the really gay horses left the Barn of Solitude long ago"? (They were frightened off by what Clark & Lex were doing in there.)
Sheri S. Tepper, Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse: This is a short book, apparently the third in a series about Marianne, who has some sort of connection with Higher Powers that isn't all that important in this book. She's also heavily pregnant when she gets sucked into an errand for her dying aunt, an errand that involves returning a golden matchbox to a person who just might be connected to a rash of disappearances around the world. I didn't feel lost having missed the first two books, and it was interesting to read early Tepper, before she started to write long, but already concerned with gender roles and their reversals.
Johanna Sinisalo, Troll: A Love Story, translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas: Angel, a gay photographer, comes across some thugs beating up a baby troll – an endangered and highly elusive species whose physical similarities to humans are the result of coevolution rather than common ancestry – rescues the troll, hides it at home, and begins an emotional and sexual journey. The story is told by mixed POVs interspersed with scholarly texts on trolls; the language is a few degrees awry from lyrical, and I wonder if that's an effect of translation. It was a quick, compelling read about the ways in which people try to make others conform to their images of an ideal; the photographer's reaction to the troll is not, in the end, terribly different from other characters' reactions to Angel's beauty. Worth seeking out if you can deal with the suggestions of perversion – there's nothing explicit.
Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten: Further adventures of Thursday Next in Jurisfiction. In The Well of Lost Plots Thursday is pregnant, though her husband has been erased from history by the evil Goliath Corporation. Thursday is hiding out in an unpublished book in the Well while getting further training in Jurisfiction operations from Miss Havisham, but she can't seem to stay out of trouble – she even gets involved in rewriting the plot in her book in an attempt to save it from disassembly back into primordial text (the fate of many failed books). Something Rotten sees her back in the "real" world, or as real as a world obsessed with Jane Austen and fighting a centuries-long Crimean War can be. Thursday's husband is back, in fits and starts, but Goliath is making the move from corporation to religion as part of its attempt to fight an oddly specific prophecy, and if Thursday can't lead her cricket team to victory, the world will be destroyed. Wacky plots treated seriously are Fforde's stock in trade, along with satires of various book-related things – technology and eBooks in The Well of Lost Plots and Hamlet and its various adaptations in Something Rotten. I can't say I ever laughed out loud, but there were moments where the farce really worked. Sadly, the most farcical page in The Well of Lost Plots was probably the permissions page, where it appears that mere references to several books were made only with the copyright owners' permission. And people wonder why I don't think fair use is enough to protect transformative uses!
Sean Stewart, Cloud's End: This was the last Stewart I picked up, though there's still one more book out there. It's set in a world where dreams, or something like dreams, create islands, which eventually stabilize enough for people to colonize them. A small group of islanders travel from the edge of the world towards the center, where a war born of spirit-induced madness threatens to wreak horrible destruction. There are spirits who can become people and people who become spirits, including one who "twins" one of the main characters, taking on all her memories. As usual, the strength of the book is Stewart's lyrical writing. In general, I like his books best when they're set in a mundane world so the language gets its best contrast with the subject matter, but Cloud's End managed a good balance of mystical world-building with description of that world.
Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster: In a possibly postapocalyptic world, people are either mentally null slaves or psychically talented masters, though most of the latter are subordinate to other, stronger psychics. There are also mutated rebels who cannot be mentally controlled, though they can be killed by telekinesis – a good twist, I thought, having differential vulnerability. But the rebels are distant threats in this story of a young man coming into his own strengths, betrayed by his mentors, forced into the household of a man who will either break him or kill him. This was Butler's most brutal world yet, because the characters were all so compromised by their circumstances; not one of the main characters was moral or even aspired to morality. They never realized their own corruption and rarely acknowledged the horrors they inflicted on others. Even when the protagonist did a bit to mitigate the sufferings of some of the null slaves, it was mostly in his own self-interest and he didn't care enough to pursue the issue past the time their pain was shoved in his face. With all that, I didn't dislike the story – I just wished there had been some hope in it, but I could tell that hope would have been a lie.
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith's Brood: This is a collection of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, the story of three generations of survivors of a devastating nuclear war. After the war, the alien Oankali plucked a few surviving humans from Earth and began modifying them genetically as part of a program of "trade," involuntary as it was for the humans. Unaltered humans are not allowed to breed. Altered ones can only breed with the assistance of an Oankali. I found the first novel most compelling, because it was so good at evoking the protagonist's impossible choices (or lack thereof) when she's selected to be a liason between Oankali and other humans. Butler's theme is pretty much always "compromise," in all its meanings. I understood why the other humans hated and feared Lilith even as I also understood exactly why she went along with the Oankali plans. The later novels deal with more advanced Oankali-human hybrids, and while the Oankali remain alien and unable to understand certain things that seem obvious to humans, by the end the hybrids seem to be becoming different from Oankali or human before. The Oankali were frustrating, inflexible and inhuman, but that really worked; what they thought they had to learn from humans was not at all what the humans wanted them to learn, which is unusual for a first contact story.
So many comics to review! In the meantime: why are you not reading Ex Machina? Go, go, go – the first trade is out and Mitchell Hundred, God from the Machine and Mayor of New York City, awaits you!
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