I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Yoon Ha Lee, Extracurricular Activities: Short story featuring Shuos Jedao before all that unpleasantness, back when he was merely an incredibly dangerous operative working in smaller-scale intelligence. Jedao leads a mission to rescue an old friend from a rival government and finds something different than he expected.

KJ Charles, The Price of Meat: If you get it. That is, the title is a Sweeney Todd reference, though in fact Sweeney is not the cannibal here, despite the presence of a Johanna in need of rescue from the lunatic asylum. The story is set in an alternate London with a section—the liberty—in which the queen’s law does not run; in order to secure help getting her beloved Johanna free from the asylum, our heroine goes undercover at Sawney Reynard’s barbershop, which backs up against the liberty and into which many men have of late disappeared. I didn’t quite get the point of having Sweeney Todd be a separate historical figure here (I suspect weird IP anxieties).

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Flowers of Vashnoi: Ekaterin investigates the remediation of a radioactive portion of the Vorkosigan lands and finds more than she expected, which is saying a lot since she expected to find glowing butterbugs that had been modified to eat radioactive material. A nice little story about small successes and failures.

Diane Duane, The Levin-Gad: Tales of the Five #1: I would have to reread the entire old series to fully get this story about one of the members of the titular goddess-touched group, but it was nice enough anyway. While other members of the family are otherwise occupied, a human goes to a bar in search of the Dark, much to the dismay of the barkeep.

Karen Healey & Robyn Fleming, The Empress of Timbra: Book One of the Hidden Histories: Fantasy in which two half-siblings, both recognized by their noble father though he didn’t marry either of their mothers (it’s that kind of society), have to use their wits and magical talents to survive a lot of palace intrigue that would like to kill one and put the other on the throne. I enjoyed it, though I could have done without the extended epilogue that is a parody of academic writing and treats the events of the main book as possibly apocryphal vestiges of a poorly understood past.

K.D. Edwards, The Last Sun: Rune is the sole survivor of the massacre of his House (and of a gang rape, to which there are a couple of fragmentary but intense/graphic flashbacks) who ekes out a living doing various magical retrieval jobs. The one that opens the book ends with him in custody of a traumatized seventeen-year-old, and then his semi-employer sends him on a job searching for another noble, who turns out to be (a) a hottie and (b) caught up in a very deadly plot. There is a lot of worldbuilding—this is all going on in what remains of Nantucket after the Atlanteans transferred a lot of their magic and a bunch of stolen buildings there in the wake of a war/disaster that destroyed Atlantis; they have Houses that track the Tarot Arcana and Rune’s the heir coming into Arcana power; they have cellphones as well as sigils that can store spells and that form the basis of Atlantean wealth; and I haven’t even mentioned Rune’s bonded Companion human. It’s a lot, but I enjoyed the heck out of it.

Vivian Vande Velde, Never Trust a Dead Man: Slight fantasy about a nebbishy, near-stalkery guy who is falsely accused of murdering his romantic rival, locked up to die with said rival’s corpse, and then self-indentured to a witch who promises to help him figure out the real killer in return for years of service. This ends up with the spirit of the dead guy in a bat disguised as a bird, with our hero disguised as a local girl. Basically everybody in it is a creep.

Martha Wells, The Cloud Roads: Moon doesn’t know what he is, only that he’s not like the other groundling races he’s met in his wanderings, and in his shapeshifted flying form he physically resembles the predatory Fell that like to tear the other sentient races apart for food and fun. After he’s discovered and left to die by his latest community, he’s rescued by another Raksura (which it turns out is what he is), but things don’t get a lot better. Moon is traumatized and distrustful, and many of the other Raksura he meets don’t trust him right back. It’s a good adventure story with a dash of found family, especially by the end, but there is a fair amount of biological determinism tied up with the different shapes and magical abilities of the different Raksura, if that’s not your thing.

Am what a school friend of mine would call "in a bad head."  Will get through it; if you give me fic prompts I'll see if I can shake off the funk & do something, even if it's just a sentence or two from the resulting story.
( Fairy tales, Bujold, Martin, Wong )

I am committing SV vids in my head. It's a good thing I lack the time and the technology, or I'd have a new hobby to inflict on you all. Currently, I'm stuck on this:

( I love Bruce Springsteen, even if he's lost his voice )

Very Bad Day at school: I showed my students Monty Python, and they still sat there like scrambled eggs, refusing to respond. Perhaps I have confused them so much that silence seems the only option. I like the subject so much; why can't I make them like it too?

I also have been doing reviews, but now there's such a backlog I'll do them a bit at a time. Some fiction:
( Snicket, Bujold, Kress, J.A. Jance, David Auburn, Alan Dean Foster, Pratchett, Mark Haddon, not in that order )

Greetings, sportsfans. In an attempt to distract myself from more pressing concerns, I present some books of interest. Authors covered: Sarah Andrews, Maxx Barry, Michael Bronski, Lois McMaster Bujold, Jim Butcher, Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Handler, Dan Savage, and Don Winslow.

( Read more... )

I’m also 60 pages in to John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy, picked because I wanted to read about a nobler endeavor, and I’m really enjoying it. Those beautiful, complex, rounded British sentences – I love them, and the subject matter is fascinating. Ooh, and for bedside reading I have a SV novel with Lex on the cover. I’m not exactly a hard sell in matters touching Lex, and it was half off at the Strand (as was the Jim Butcher novel).

In other news, I took the “which Supreme Court Justice are you?” quiz at selectsmart, and got Ginsburg & Breyer before Souter, which shows how much the quizmaker knows. The questions weren’t really designed to sort as between Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter, or between O’Connor and Kennedy, or between Scalia and Thomas. The questions were also infelicitously worded: “Do you support racial gerrymandering?” Um, yeah, I think voting districts ought to be drawn so that minorities have a good chance at proportional representation in the legislature; what about you?

More Martha soon. And then more slash.

Someone gave me 2 months of LJ. Thanks, whoever you are! But now I need advice about what I can do with a paid account, because I haven't been around here that long. What should I do?

I, too, paid money to see Nemesis ($20 for two tickets, plus $7.14 for popcorn and a drink, thank you very much New York City). Bits warmed my fangirl heart, but mainly the movie reminded me of why I like Firefly.

1. On Firefly, explosions in space don't make any noise. And they shouldn't. One small step for science, one giant step for television.

2. On a related note, Z. pointed out that -- absent really good, but stupid, gravitic stabilizers -- what happens when one solid object rams into another of about the same mass in space includes transfer of momentum, so that the second mass would move and not just hang there, getting progressively more crunched by the first. The ramming scene was, however, cool, and so Nemesis gets a bit of a pass on that. Does anyone remember a ST novel (TOS, I think, but TNG is a possibility) which includes a passage something like: "He gave an order rarely heard in the annals of spacefaring: 'Ramming speed!'" There was something about the difference between battle shields and the standard skinshields used by starships to deflect space junk and other small objects, too. I looked for it in my collection, but I think it might have gone in the great purge of '02.

3. Forget the Prime Directive -- everybody else does -- it's dereliction of duty for the captain to be on the away team. Okay, on a diplomatic mission, I see the need to have all the high-ranking officers, but that's an exception. Random planet? Redshirts should comprise the team, not just be in the background to get slaughtered. TNG had some great episodes, but it was often hampered by storylines assuming that no one involved ever read the When I Am an Evil Overlord list. Contrast Mal, kicking the recalcitrant goon into the engines. He's read the list, he is the list.

4. Relatedly, there are other ways to create dramatic tension than to have the captain say, "This is something I've got to do for myself." I devoutly hope that I wasn't the only one in the theater who muttered, "No! No it's not!" This is a fundamental difference in outlook. I love Joss Whedon's universes because bad things happen to good people, and they can't be taken back, and no one's an expert in everything (and when someone tries, it's generally Bad and Wrong, viz. Willow and River), and sometimes Giles has to do what Buffy can't. Joss deals in brutal reality, albeit through metaphors; he's a lot like Stephen King that way, whose memorable answer to the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" in the story "The Moving Finger" was "Because they can." This is a theme running through King's writing; "From a Buick 8" was a particularly heavy-handed version of the same thesis, but it's there in the rest of his work too. In TNG, the captain can say that stupid line because he's not really going to die -- the plot protects him. In Firefly, he might die -- technically, he did die -- and so he doesn't act all macho about it. I could go on about how this is related to one's idea of God, and how Whedon's version is a lot kinder to God in that it posits that God isn't killing babies and whales purposefully, but I won't.

In other news, I've been reading Nancy Kress and C.S. Friedman, thanks again to Half.com. I finished Kress's "Probability Moon" and "Beaker's Dozen." The former is the first in a trilogy about World, a planet of humanoids with one major difference from Earth humans: they share Reality, a sort of collective consciousness (though not a group mind) such that only people who share Reality are human and others are completely ignored or even killed. Although certain crimes such as theft are expected, crimes against the body break Reality and cause the perpetrator to be thrust from society until the crime is properly expiated. An Earth expedition, following up a preliminary expedition, comes to World, ostensibly to study the culture but in fact to check out a device in the planet's system that may be a superweapon against the Fallers, an alien race whose attacks are destroying Earth's colonies and threaten Earth itself. And that's just the first few chapters. The book is a good read, though Kress's primary human villain is too much caricature to be really satisfying. I'll read the rest of the trilogy when I can get it cheap.

"Beaker's Dozen" is, as one might expect, a collection of short stories, including one about World. The collection includes the original "Beggars in Spain," a story that stands very well on its own and in my opinion is stronger in this form than in the expanded novel Kress wrote after she got the Hugo (or maybe it was the Nebula). Most of these stories are about manipulating the human brain, or occasionally the human body, to be better or different than it is via evolution alone. Sometimes the mutants are nonhuman, dogs or viruses. Kress's ideas are fascinating and the stories usually satisfying. The cruelty of women, often sisters or mothers, to each other is the other major theme, entwined into the biomanipulation plots. I wish that there had been more positive female relationships in the stories, but that's my preference and not a statement about the stories themselves, which were provocative and generally well-done. The final story, about ballet and children as extensions of their parents, and partially told from the POV of an enhanced dog, was particularly powerful.

"Maximum Light" remains my favorite Kress novel, about a world in which multiple low-level chemical exposures -- go here for a bit of the underlying science -- have produced a generation of humans with ADHD, developmental delays, and other big problems. The protagonist is a girl who's smart and competent by comparison to her cohort, but who's seemingly incapable of rising to the standards of past generations. She gets caught up in a scheme that violates the bodies of some of the remaining healthy people -- to say more would give away too much. The book is troubling, in part because the main premise is all too plausible.

I read "In Conquest Born" by C.S. Friedman a while ago, and found it well-written and interesting but offputting because of the gender politics of one of the competing human variants. (I should make clear that Friedman didn't endorse those gender politics; it was part of the plot.) Friedman likes to write about opposing worldviews and the difficulty of thinking like the Other, whether the Other is human, alien, or something in between. "This Alien Shore," which I bought because it was a NYT Notable Book, is about a young girl being pursued by a vicious Earth corporation, in a universe in which humanity has subdivided into multiple subspecies. One of the subspecies has mastered the art of FTL travel; everyone else who tries to pilot an FTL ship dies horribly, along with the rest of the ship. This subspecies therefore dictates the behavior of everyone else. Jamisia doesn't know why the corporation is after her, but her brainware is slowly giving her clues as her personality seems to be coming apart. Friedman manages to create a satisfactory universe in a single, though long, book, and doesn't succumb here to the trilogy temptation.

Bolstered by this good experience (and seduced by the Michael Whelan covers, which used to be enough to get me to buy any book so adorned), I tried "The Madness Season," which is my favorite so far. Daetrin is human, sort of; he's old, as in centuries old, and has certain needs that are not shared by normal humans. He's lived under the domination of the alien Tyr for centuries, along with the rest of humanity, until some of his special characteristics are discovered and he's taken from Earth to be studied. The Tyr are a group mind -- with some notable exceptions. Daetrin has to figure out how to survive, which requires him to remember parts of his past he's been all too successful at forgetting. And, perhaps, there's something he can do to liberate Earth. The plot is complicated and engaging, though perhaps a bit weakened by the presence of some aliens with really useful powers at crucial points. The dialogue I most envy:

"What happened with you and Kost?" she asked softly.
I managed to shrug. "He offered me power and glory. I called him an asshole."
"He's very angry."
"I said it well."

I'm about to try Friedman's big trilogy, which sounds a bit more fantasy-oriented, though also based on a "colonization" framework. I'm hopeful. Friedman reminds me a bit of M.A. Foster, who also wrote about human variants, though maybe it's just the Whelan covers that remind me.

Finally, Lois McMaster Bujold, "The Spirit Ring." This one isn't a Vorkosigan novel. Set instead in a past Italy where magic works, the main protagonist is a young girl, daughter of a powerful mage and goldsmith. When her father's patron is brutally slaughtered, she's thrust into intrigue and magic plots and must find her way between survival, revenge, the church's condemnation of many types of magic, and true love. Engaging enough, but I think I like the Vorkosigans better.

Whew! And next week I have a presenter coming, and the last three classes are student presentations, so I really only have four more classes to create materials for. Unfortunately, I'm prepared in reverse order: I'm done with the materials for the very last class, halfway with the one before that, and almost totally unprepared for the one two weeks from now. Today we did an exercise involving a fake product and critiqued and designed advertising for the product. I hope it was okay for the students; I thought it might be a nice change of pace, and I did get more overall participation, which has been a concern of mine.

Okay, now for the weekly book review: Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign. This book, evidently part of a series about the Vorkosigans, a clan from a patriarchal, militaristic planet, centers on the romantic trials and tribulations of Miles Vorkosigan, a dwarf and important political figure, and his clone brother Mark. I felt I got enough background on the series that I could understand what was going on without being bored by the exposition. The lead characters are people, with quirks and annoying habits (though some of the bad guys are caricatures). Several sequences, including most notably a dinner party at which things go spectacularly wrong, made me laugh out loud. At the gym. And I'm an easily embarrassed type, so making me laugh out loud in public is high praise.

So why do I feel uncomfortable about praising this book? It's very well-written. I think the trouble is that everything moved too neatly, as if on greased skids. At the end, Miles achieved romantic and political triumph all at once, and there was great rejoicing. Now, Rivka, you're saying, do you mean that a complicated plot should be poorly resolved? No, but ... it's not just that the ending was tied up with a pretty bow, but that at times I felt like I was watching a really intricate Rube Goldberg contraption without the uncertainty about whether the thing would work. True, I was surprised by some of the details of the dinner party, yet it was clearly The Dinner Party at Which Things Go Wrong. And then there was the obligatory Bug Butter Fight (don't ask).

Basically, I'm complaining that Bujold followed the rules too well. Having introduced a gun (or bug butter) in Act 1, she ensured it was fired in Act 3. And she did that with numerous subplots. All of them were entertaining. Their simultaneous resolutions did not require too much coincidence, because she'd set it up that way at the beginning. Just -- nothing about the resolution surprised me, or made me think that the characters had failed a moral test or changed through experience. They'd moved forward on that great chessboard called life, yet they were still fundamentally the same, albeit Miles had more self-knowledge.

What this means is that my standards for "really satisfying book" involve more moral ambiguity and risk, I think. I *liked* that Anita Blake slowly became a sociopath over the course of Laurell Hamilton's series, though I'm not sure I want to read more of her adventures unless and until Anita does something about that. Susan R. Mathews, James Alan Gardner, David Brin and the like offer space opera plus, and Bujold's book is really really good space opera, full stop. I will certainly read more of her books -- good genre writing is rare enough -- but I doubt I'll be slavering in anticipation for the next one the way I am for the authors named above.

There's No Sex in Your Violence

Now, on to my real obsession: Smallville. Thamiris said a lot that I agree with about Clark acting like Jonathan's image of Lex, which suggests that it's also (at least in part) Clark's image of Lex.

I also agree that Clark's rebellious side was pretty tame except when it came to spending other people's money. For example, borrowing a friend's car with permission was not overly evil -- Rebellious!Lana just up and stole the keys when she was all Nicodemused. Clark's covetousness was the really bad part of him. This is interesting because concentrating his wrongdoing on filthy lucre meant that he wasn't a sexual threat to anyone, despite his ogling. By contrast, Nicodemus!Pete did have a bit of the sexual threat vibe with Chloe (and Hyena!Xander had a lot of sex in his violence, to take a Buffy example of twisted desires/lifted inhibitions; the point is that the trope of a man's lifted inhibitions usually includes an element of sexual threat). Clark wanted to kiss Lana, but I don't think the red meteor rock gave him any better idea of what he wanted to do next than he had before. Clark's more comfortable being asexual, even if he wants to have a girl hanging on his arm like all the successful (Lexlike) guys do.

On a much lower level, I did like Lex's double-take when he checked out Clark's ... new duds. Michael Rosenbaum played it well; I believed that his train of thought had been derailed by this vision of young manhood, and I also thought he gave a nice jealous delivery of his lines when Clark wanted to borrow his car. But most interesting to me was the editing choice to allow MR a few seconds' worth of double-take when he first saw Bad!Clark, which would be more usual for a romantic interest than for a friend. Text, subtext, tomato, tomahto.

PS: To see the power of the Dark Side, check out Small Wars (zip file). And for a promo that explains exactly why SV is slashy, try Forbidden Love (RealMedia). You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll say it was better than Cats.