primeideal

"The Frugal Wizard's Handbook..." was Sanderson's homage to "Project Hail Mary" and the white-room trope. "Yumi and the Nightmare Painter" is Sanderson's homage to Your Name/Kimi no Na Wa, and I found the parallels to be pretty stark, so let's get that out of the way first.

Secondly, Tress of the Emerald Sea featured the recurring Cosmere character/humorous but unreliable narrator, Hoid. He narrates, but he can't actually be a major character within the story, because he'd overpower everyone else, so his powers are nerfed by being under a gibberish curse. "Yumi" features...Hoid as narrator, but he's nerfed by being temporarily transformed into a coatrack. This is the kind of gimmick that works once, but I feel like could lead to rapidly diminishing returns, and didn't work for me here as well. In part because the tie-ins to other Cosmere worlds/magic systems felt like more of a distraction/less relevant to the plot this time. When Hoid sits down at the end to be like "okay, this reveal is confusing, let me explain," it's an acknowledgment of the contrived situation as well as the ending "Sanderlanche." (To be fair, "Your Name" also had the magic get increasingly weird as things went, but still.)

Yumi lives in fantasy Korea and is proficient in the art of rock stacking, which attracts curious spirits whose magical powers can be put to use in villages she passes through. Nakiro, the Painter, lives in neo-noir fantasy Japan and is proficient in the art of nightmare painting, which keeps the evil shroud surrounding the city at bay. Clearly, there's something going on here with "the value of art and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations for your career." No spoilers on that front. Sanderson mentions in the endnotes that he wanted to depict people whose jobs are fantastical to ush, but ordinary-ish in the contexts of their settings, and that's a trope he wants to see more of. I agree we should see more of this and I agree he does it well!

The settings are...well, like I said, they're fantasy Korea and neo-noir Japan. Hoid lampshades this by saying "I can't translate register so I'll just tell you if it's 'high' or 'low' in a way that is plot-relevant." Maybe this is an unfair expectation, but I feel like from Sanderson I would expect a more eclectic range of inspirations--like, maybe Nakiro's people watch historical dramas about wandering ronin, but couldn't they also eat fajitas and play mbiras? Does borrowing from a mishmash of RL traditions make it more or less problematic?

Some tropes involved include: the "essential"-ness of "essential workers" (pandemic novel), the threat that AI art does (or doesn't) pose to human art, and a fourth-wall heavy conversation about "are sad endings necessary at times?" Which, I wasn't going to take "yeah, that's just how life has to be" for an answer from Sanderson of all people--even Mistborn era 1, which was bittersweet, had a great and hopeful resolution.

Nikaro has a difficult backstory with a group of his school friends. On the one hand, points for Sanderson for only glancing on it once or twice before the reveal, it's annoying when the characters are like "We Have A Backstory That Recontextualizes Everything" and then hide it from the reader for drama. On the other, I got the impression that Yumi was impressively quick to forgive him/minimize the pain he caused others. Or maybe she's just not ascribing intentionality to it.

One of the character arcs is that Yumi, whose entire life has been lived in very narrow limits of what is appropriate/proper, has to learn to exercise agency and choice and stand up for herself. And one of her first real examples of having freedom to do something for herself, just for the sake of it is...a new female friend taking her to the department store to get dresses. I felt like after "Mistborn," Sanderson kind of learned his lesson about "women can have more plotlines than just the feminine makeover trope" but...maybe we still need to review that one, sigh.

Hoid (and Yumi) go very heavy on the italics. I recognize that I am far from without sin, here, but if even I, an overdoer of the art, call you out on it, you maybe have too many italics.

So those were some criticisms, now here are some fun/clever lines.

A ritual ceremony early on (even alien worlds love the Fibonacci sequence!):

A short time later, Chaeyung and Hwanji followed with a floating plate holding crystalline soaps. They rubbed her once with the first, then she rinsed. Once with the second, then she rinsed. Twice with the third. Three times with the fourth. Five times with the fifth. Eight times with the sixth. Thirteen times with the seventh.

You might think that extreme. If so, have you perhaps never heard of religion?

Liyun is kind of a love-to-hate-her antagonist, a really well-handled depiction of the condescension/guilt-trips, or "pretend you have a choice but you really don't have any choice" adults can sometimes induce on talented kids:

“You must remember,” Liyun said, “that you are a resource to the land. Like the water of the steamwell. Like the plants, the sunlight, and the spirits. If you do not take care of yourself, you will squander the great position and opportunity you have been given.”

(the context being that Liyun has given Yumi no model for how to take care of herself and no description of what it would look like.)

Something about Liyun simply set him off. We’ve all had that experience with one human mosquito or another—if it’s not the buzzing, then the leeching of our blood will do it.

She seemed sorry in the same way a tank commander might be apologetic after destroying your house. He might be in the wrong. But he was still in a tank.

“She could be less a personification of a crusted-over paintbrush, mind you. But…I can empathize.”

Nakiro's city has very little private transit, they just take buses and trolleys everywhere thanks to the magical ~~neon~~ hion lights that paint the city cool noir colors and connect everything. So their technique for traveling to the neighboring planet in their system is to...extend the hion lights all the way out to the next planet and take a "space bus" up there. :D

Anyway. If I'm being hard on Sanderson, it's from having high standards, not being a hater. But my reaction to "The Frugal Wizard's Handbook..." was, "if you want a really great white-room mystery about a guy who wakes up with no memory, builds a grandiose conception of how he got there, realizes he actually wasn't all that, chooses to be a better person, and earns his happy ending...I would start with Project Hail Mary, but then this might be a letdown." If you want a beautiful, artistic, visually evocative, compelling story about a young man from a modern-day urban Japanesque society and a young woman from a medieval-esque East Asian society who are bound together in increasingly weird ways...I would start with Your Name. But then this might be a letdown. Caveat lector.

This book was extremely targeted at me. It's a riff on Raymond Queneau's "Exercises in Style," except it's math, different methods used to solve a cubic equation. Includes such methods as Medieval (European and Islamic), Arborescent (the "Gentzen Trees" which I learned about, briefly, in logic), Outsider (crank emails), Research Seminar (impenetrable), and Tea (what happens after the Research Seminar, and may be slightly easier to understand, or at least feature math puns). Highly recommended if you are literally me.

Not bingo, I just had a lot of thoughts!

On some level, (speculative) fiction works on a literary version of the anthropic principle. No matter how strange the events are, they have to be comprehensible to human readers, and if there are human characters in the book, to them too. Otherwise, no story. When I was reading "A Desolation Called Peace," this occurred to me, and I speculated then that "A type of creature who lived on timescales that were orders of magnitude greater or lesser than ours is never going to be able to carry on a conversation with us." Meanwhile, in Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace has this initial fear upon making first contact. Later, he concludes that characters from different species point out that they're both affected by gravity, and they need to be able to think, run, and find food/avoid predators/throw objects at a comparable speed.

Well, in "Dragon's Egg," the fundamental premise is "what if aliens really did have experience life a million times faster than humans, and we made first contact anyway." Which is so creative and original that I was very impressed, and now I wonder why more stories haven't tried this!

Forward was, IRL, a neutron star researcher, so yeah, he absolutely did do the research on this one. The book was written in 1980 and the "human" part of the plot begins in the "distant future" of 2020, so it's amusing to see what he got right and wrong--in this future, the Cold War quietly fizzled out and space exploration became a lesser priority, but it's now a peaceful collaboration between the USSR/US/Europe. Thrifty academics still have to plot graphs themselves even though the computer could do it for them, because computers will charge you for each computation and that comes out of your advisor's budget. And when the neutron star makes its closest approach to the solar system, its gravity will slightly perturb the outer planets, "especially Pluto." Too soon! :P

Because of the huge timescale, the alien "cheela" civilization discover agriculture, mathematics, religion, empire, and warfare in about a human month, so we obviously aren't going to follow any individual characters over that entire timespan. Instead we get short snippets of cheela discoveries at different stages of their evolution. One of the cheela discovers the idea of "bijection" without having names for numbers beyond three, and uses this to challenge her clan leader for dominance because she realizes their food scarcity. I suspect "One Two Three...Infinity" may have been an influence here.

There are some passages that are cute in that they successfully get across how inhuman the cheela are, while still making sense without a background in neutron star physics. Like, this passage of cheela sex is weirdly adorable?

They took turns kneading on each other's topsides with their treads, concentrating on their favorite spots. Then with their eye-stubs firmly entwined to pull their very edges together, their mutual vibrations raised in pitch with an electronic tingle adding a overtone of spice to the massage. Finally, in a multiple spasm of their bodies, a dozen tiny perimeter orifices just under North-Wind's eye-stubs opened--to emit a small portion of his inner juices into the waiting folds around Swift-Killer's eye-stubs.

D'aww. Unfortunately, there is some weird 80s sexism in both the human and cheela depictions; the human women are totally beautiful and effeminate while also being science geniuses, and "warriors out on patrol like to pair off for 'recreation' during off hours" gets repeated ad nauseum for the cheela. Similarly, the "religious experience" triggered by scanner light waves from the human spacecraft is compared to orgasm. Are there no other pleasurable experiences to talk about, really?

I did think the "female grad student has her findings get famous under her male advisor's name" and "female cheela military officer and namesake of an important encampment is dimly remembered as maybe some male generations after her time" were less one-note and more "it do be like that sometimes," though. Also, while the cheela are sexually dimorphic, their social structures are different from humans; hatchlings are raised in a collective "egg pen" by the Old Ones who are no longer engaged in combat, and in almost every situation wouldn't know who their birth parents were. Neat worldbuilding.

There's an in-universe "appendix" with some of the scientific data gleaned from the trek; one of the scientists is a descendant of Frank Drake, and the "main" human character, Pierre Niven, writes a book about his experiences that becomes "the only book to win the Nobel, Pulitzer, Hugo, Nebula, and Moebius prizes in the same year." *Obama giving Obama a medal meme*

But ultimately, the fact that the humans are able to beam down their encyclopedias of knowledge to the cheela, and the next day receive a transmission about the cheela's new discoveries on FTL travel, is an incredibly cool if poignant premise. "These fifteen-minute lifetime friendships are hard on the emotions," Drake points out, but science this imaginative can make up for the inherent characterization limitations on the cheela's part.

Sometimes you come across a book where you've sort of, kind of, osmosed what it's about and then when you actually read it, it turns out that it sort of was but also sort of wasn't what you expected. And sometimes, the actual book is better! "The Worst Journey in the World" was like that for me. This isn't a review per se, this is a broad outline of "what I expected versus what it actually was, and some caveats/notes about the reading experience.

"Worst Journey" is Apsley Cherry-Garrard's account of the Terra Nova expedition, written ~10 years after the fact. Terra Nova is known for Robert Scott's expedition to the South Pole, in which the English party were beaten by the Norwegians to the South Pole, died on the return trip, got praised as heroes for their stoicism and stiff-upper-lip attitude, got deconstructed because imperialism is bad mkay and this is Norwegian competence erasure, got reconstructed because actually their planning was reasonably competent given the knowledge of Antarctic weather they had...Etc.

After returning from Antarctica, Cherry-Garrard served in WWI, but he had physical and mental health issues that plagued him for many decades afterwards. The Wikipedia article on Terra Nova quotes Scott biographer David Crane on Cherry-Garrard: "the future interpreter, historian and conscience of the expedition." So what I expected was something pretty darn bleak, the retrospective of a man struggling with post-traumatic stress, feeling survivor's guilt, maybe second-guessing himself. Compared to other surreal, stranger-than-fiction polar narratives, I wasn't sure it would be all that appealing to me.

In fact, the style of "Worst Journey" is much more relevant to my interests than I'd guessed! Cherry-Garrard doesn't mess around--he has kind of a Hugolian style at times in telling you how tragic, or miraculous, or Extra something will be. There's a lot less "jaded postwar nihilism" and a lot more "hey, we were brave, we were smart, we had a plan," tonewise.

There is also a lot going on that's not related to the polar journey; the less well-known plotlines are just as fascinating in the sense of "how did everyone else survive." The titular "worst journey" refers to a journey to gather emperor penguin eggs in the Antarctic winter, which was unprecedented and also miserably cold; Cherry-Garrard was part of that trio and has firsthand insight. A group of six get trapped on "Inexpressible Island" and have terrible ptomaine poisoning. In one of the returning supply parties, the leader almost dies of scurvy and asks his comrades to leave him behind, they refuse. Somehow everyone gets through this and records it in the stereotypically understated British way?

And so a lot of it is not just "Cherry-Garrard writing a decade later," but also copious excerpts from his real-time diary, together with other people's diaries/letters/notes. The contrast among everyone (Bowers is an adorable mama's boy, Wilson is artistic but laconic, Lashly is a normal "seaman"/non-officer so he's straightforward and to the point without a lot of book-learning, stylistically) was a neat surprise.

The book is long. I read it in several stints, several months apart, so my memory may be erratic, but I highlighted lots and lots of interesting turns of phrase on my e-reader to resume. Some parts are like "for the benefit of future expeditions, it would be wise to learn from what we did well and what went poorly, here is a general comparison of dogs versus horses versus mules versus humans for sledge-hauling," and these are less engaging, but then a few pages later Cherry-Garrard will be anthropomorphizing penguins again.

If I were to post all of these "over-the-top/hilarious/melodramatic/vividly written highlights" as an enticement, or even some of them, we would be here all day, so here is an overly long Google doc. tl;dr it is a lot, but if you are on the fence, at least browse some of it! (But this may only be useful advice if your tastes are like mine.)

From "Madhouse at the End of the Earth," emphasis mine:

It was customary for expedition leaders to publish memoirs upon their return. This was in large part how they made their money, how they paid off creditors, and how they financed future expeditions. In the absence of easily accessible natural resources to exploit, stories were what polar explorers extracted from these barren icescapes. And the best stories weren't the ones in which everything went well. [Footnote continues] Publishers of adventure narratives were bloodthirsty types. They tended to be more interested in expeditions that went awry than ones in which nobody suffered extensively...

On the one hand, this is more evidence for the "neurotypicals, why are they like this" manifesto. Like, very often I am not bloodthirsty, I want to read about people setting new records and doing science and having adventures and not dying!

But. The imagery of "stories as a natural resource ripe for exploiting." I don't want to push this too far, but--there are lots of parts of the world, such as the Arctic, that are not the most pleasant weather-wise but are certainly inhabitable and life-supporting for humans, the evidence for this being that...humans live there and have done so for hundreds of years! Stories about "wide-eyed outsiders coming in and trying to set new records and earn honor and glory" quickly turn into "evil colonialists erasing the actual competent people who actually live here." And that's a DNW for me, which is one of the main reasons I've never gotten into the Terror. (See: this post from

melannen a year ago and comments. GOOD NEWS I found out about Vihjalmur Stefansson and he was every bit as shambolic as promised! This happened totally by accident and not because I remembered his name from the discussion!)

So the "fun" thing about the Antarctic is that there's literally nobody there but us penguins. Yes, there's always the climate change/imperialist motivations/certain dudes being actual creeps angles to problematize things. But IDK, the whole "there's nothing here to sustain us except our stories, there's nothing we can earn here except a good story" aspect sure...has me feeling some kind of way.

Okay, so this might be a fandom that does more in anon space than namespace, but whatever. As mentioned a couple weeks ago, I have, er, taken the plunge back into polar exploration fandom, broadly defined. Here are some other enticements/highlights from "Empire of Ice and Snow."

when the ship is being crushed the last day, the captain takes out his phonograph and starts playing record after record, then chucks them into the fire once they're done, ending with the "Funeral March" by Chopin.
a literal guide dog, and a lucky cat
like "Endurance," there's a long trek by just a couple people who go for rescue; unlike Endurance, there are language barriers but also a bunch of random kindness of strangers moments.
"a tiny native Siberian of just over four feet tall nicknamed—with a literalness that Bartlett found endearing—Little."
the Scottish dude quotes from the Scottish edition of the Psalms
Russian warships almost come to the rescue but then World War I happens and the ships have to turn back :(
one of our heroes "described his first meal of walrus as 'Excellent! Tasted like roast beef.' He had said the same thing about his first bear meat, too, but was so hungry, apparently any large animal meat reminded him of roast beef."
more food reviews: "Some of the eggs were unfortunately too advanced in development to still be considered eggs, but they ate them anyway. Chafe joked about it, quipping, 'They would not have been considered marketable under the Pure Food Laws of any country. But there were no Pure Food Laws on Wrangel Island, so we ate anything that would sustain life.'"
possibly? a little bit of? murder?
one of the Inuit hunters brought along his wife, a seamstress (very critical to have warm clothes!) ... and their daughters, age 8 and 3
the girls are clearly tougher and stronger than most of the men put together

( Spoilers )

And if you like shippy dynamics, there are angles like heroic captain/villainous self-promoter, Actual #2/Guy Who Probably Should Be #2, Scottish nerd/Norwegian jock, Calming Influence Seamstress/Her Husband the Hunter. Something for everyone!

In conclusion please tell me where I can find the namespace fandom and/or stay tuned for further Cold Takes.

Around this time of year people sometimes make posts revealing the Yuletide fics they wrote and discussing the writing process. This is not that post. (That one's coming.) This is the post about "a bunch of stuff that happened over winter vacation visiting my family, much of which is sort of Yuletide-adjacent so I didn't want to spoil it." Under a cut not because it's particularly awful, just rambling.

( Read more... )

Anyway, a fun break overall, and hopefully I won't be too listless/frustrated trying to get back to work. (But it's me, so no promises.)

Some colleagues were having a discussion about the Dark Forest (as described in the Three-Body Problem trilogy) as an explanation for "why haven't we met any aliens yet?" and it veered off into other SF takes on this trope. Harry Turtledove has a short story called "The Road Not Taken" which posits another theory. Three Miles Down didn't really work for me, but this one was much pithier and to the point!

Also, it's completely unnecessary for the plot of the story, but it's also dripping with LA/Dodgers allusions. The human POV begins with astronauts on a mission to Mars learning that Fernando Valenzuela passed away at age 79, placing first contact in 2039-40. One of the military dudes is named Amoros, and goes by Sandy. The military convenes on the campus of UCLA, where a bunch of buildings are "New" X Hall, the original X Halls having been destroyed in the great earthquake of 2034. And there's a linguist named Hilda Chester.

My reaction to this goes back and forth between "short stories are more his speed, yay for stuff actually happening in this one instead of lampshading and going nowhere for 300 pages" and "how come when he namedrops his baseball heroes he's clever and an alternate history champion but when I do it I'm probably a boring tryhard." Meh.

This is not for bingo--I'm ~2/3 of the way through that and 7/12 of the way through the year, so I felt okay picking up a couple books that don't fit. :P I'm not necessarily planning to do full-scale "bingo-style reviews" for these, but it had enough "it's like X but without the Y" that I wanted to mention it just in case other people find it useful!

This was billed as a book about "what if humans discovered a sentient octopus society. First contact with all the ensuing complications, but we don't need space travel, because it's right here on Earth!"

And indeed, the main plotline is about what you would expect, based on that advertising. Like Steerswoman (especially Steerswoman #3), there's the challenges of first contact are deepened by "from a human perspective, these creatures are scary and dangerous and unknowable...but...from their perspective, we are scary and dangerous and unknowable! Dang. Tread lightly." What you might not expect are the B-plots. One of them felt like "what if Infomocracy [the modern nation-states as we know them have dissolved, replaced by tiny states and sprawling nonprofit/nongovernmental entities with lots of nebulous power]...but much darker [nobody can do anything about the slaver AI ships on international waters.]" And not only are humans pondering "what if we meet another species whose minds are complex like ours, but very different," but they're also making AI which may or may not be self-aware and grappling with "what if digital minds are like ours, but also different." There's a neat twist involving personalized semi-aware AI who serve as "emotional support" beings of a sort for individual humans.

Unfortunately, and maybe this was more a problem with my expectations, I didn't really feel as if the B-plots were as engaging/connected to the A-plot as I would have hoped. There are a couple times where we hear the same story ("there was an octopus and it attacked me! almost as if it knew what it was doing!") from multiple points of view, but it felt more repetitive than supplemental. The AI ship was SFy, sure, but it wasn't the kind of SF I cared about. Between chapters, there are excerpts from characters' in-universe books--"remember, octopus have extremely different bodies than we do, the metaphors that are significant to them will be different!" Again, it felt redundant. (This extends to quoting a poem about Odysseus--"hey look, an octopus who survives to adulthood to develop a culture and pass it down has to be a brave hero that survives many sea battles!"--which I think was also written by the author.)

The "hey look, my learnings, let me show you them" extends to namedropping the "what is it like to be a bat?" thought experiment. Only, now, it's "what is it like to be an octopus? or an AI?"

Anyway, some evocative parallels with stuff that worked for me, but overall, I felt like I'd have preferred a streamlined novella focused on the octopuses' gardens. (Yes, they call them that.)

Saw Hamilton today! Guy climbing into the seat next to me way in the back like..."pardon me, are you 304, sir."

The other guy next to me had a granddaughter in the row ahead of him, and apparently she and her friend noticed me reading "What If 2" by Randall Munroe, which I'd just gotten at the library, and they had also just gotten, so they texted him to be like "...hey, we recognized that book from the adjacent row." :D Nerds!

The performance style seemed a bit more recitative than sung at times. I especially noticed it with Burr in his intros. Some of the commentary has pointed out "Washington tends to be most stressed out when he's rapping, and most at ease when he's singing (One Last Time)." But Washington in his tent meeting Hamilton didn't feel stressed, just conversational, talky. "I need someone like you to lighten the load." OTOH, at the end of "One Last Time," it was clear that this performer really can belt, he adds some vocal wavy up-and-down-ness (I forget the technical term) that I felt was unnecessary but still impressive.

Also, this production felt a bit...huggier than others I've seen. "Say No To This" was very well-acted, Maria was great, and James Reynold was wearing an ostentatious cowboy hat like...howdy partner, give me the bribe money.

-Over a year ago there was a book sale on mostly academic nonfiction books from a university press, so of course I splurged on a bunch of e-books and then...didn't read them, usually when I'm staring at a laptop I'm not in "book reading" mode. Then I got a Kindle, but womp womp, Amazon won't transfer those file formats. So I've been procrastinating on them but slowly getting through a couple, usually as palate cleansers between the SFF bingo stuff.

One of them was about visual art/imagery around the Olympics, and I wasn't sure whether it was going to be mostly a photo book or what. Maybe it would be a fast read, just browsing pictures. Turns out there's a lot of writing/analysis surrounding the artworks. But it also turns out that...none of the pictures display because they don't have a digital license. I can try Googling the captions, but can't copy-and-paste them because plagiarism bad. Someone did not think this through.

-It's amusing how good/bad fanfiction search can be. Today someone posted on reddit they were trying to find a fic they'd read in the past about a nameless Animorphs character who shows up only in book 29. They don't know the title, the author, or the name they gave to that character, and suspected that it would be very hard to search for unless someone had read it recently or frequently. I have not.

Well, lo and behold, when you type "29" into the search box for the Animorphs page on Ao3, there are only 14 hits, and from there it's straightforward to skim through and figure out which one it is from the summary. I'm a genius! ...Actually no I'm just lucky and familiar with Ao3. (Edit: OP confirmed, yes, this is the fic in question--although it's a WIP that was last updated in 2019.)

But then I realized I had mentally thought of a fic about a different nameless character who shows up only in book 29, a few pages later. If it's on Ao3...let's see, it's probably in English, marked as "complete," not a crossover, probably less than 5000 words? And doesn't contain any of the major characters except maybe Cassie. Boom, that filters from ~1600 works to ~130. Sort by kudos and I can browse through the first couple pages--if it's not there, it's probably not on Ao3 at all. Now what? Search on FFN, but what keywords? "Controller"? "Infested"? That's for the first fic, not this one. "McDonald's?" Hmm...

Okay, forget FFN summary search, just go to Google. site:fanfiction.net Animorphs McDonald's door. Boom, page 2, hit from 2004. And yes, I backed it up.

-I had an appointment with a new-to-me counselor last week and another one today. And by the end she candidly said "I don't think I would be a good fit for you, you should look for someone who takes a different approach." I admire the honesty! Because I feel like a lot of my conversations with counselors go like

( cut for rant )

...Anyway, at least we got to this point early and didn't waste each other's time.

Recently read "Rhyme's Rooms," which is a book about the more technical aspects (rhyme/meter/alternate formats) of (especially English) poetry. There was a funny interchange where the reviewer was like "who is this book even for? people who like literary allusions and dense analysis but somehow have avoided poetry up until now?" author gets snippy "dude did you even read the book?" Having read the book, I agree with the reviewer that it's not clear who the target audience is--like, I think I knew many of the "basic" ideas already. But it was still worthwhile because it included a bunch of poems I hadn't seen before that do playful things with language! So here are some recs:

"Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line" -- some of the abbreviations are a bit of a stretch, but it's funny.

"An Evening of Russian Poetry" -- making the point that just as English has "trite" rhymes like June and moon, other languages do too.

"A Measuring Worm" -- rhyming AxA haikus!

"Easter Island" -- from a book of sonnets with lots of overlapping constraints.

Between work friends, Reddit, and the Escape Pod flash (more on that to come), I'm having a lot more discussions about speculative fic so I want to write up some of them in a more permanent format. Dreamwidth is good for pretentious-looking babbling, but beware that I am actually way too shallow and uncool for the cool kids. TL;DR.

"If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" is a flash-fiction piece from 2013 that won a Nebula Award (and got nominated for a Hugo) in the short fiction format. Even though it's short, I would argue it sort of qualifies as a "story within a story" format, because there's a frame story and then the doubly-fictional world imagined by the narrator as a what-if. In the internal story, the narrator imagines her lover as a T-Rex, who eats goats and performs love songs on Broadway. When the T-Rex eventually marries another (cloned) dinosaur, the narrator is so overcome by emotion that she turns into a flower. Because dinosaurs who perform on Broadway and humans who transform into flowers are not things that happen in our world, such events certainly fall under the umbrella of "speculative fiction."

The frame story, however, is a lot more somber. The narrator is, "in fact," speaking to a comatose lover who's been the victim of a violent crime; the perpetrators use hurtful epithets while attacking him, for instance, anti-LGBT slurs, even though the victim isn't necessarily LGBT himself. She's both mourning him and decrying the violence of a world where these things happen.

This story's success at the Hugos and Nebulas was one of the factors in the escalation of the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" campaign for slate nominations at the Hugos (though some of that had preceded this story); this kind of brigading eventually led to rule changes to, hopefully, decrease the ability of collaborating voters to nominate slates. There are a couple of criticisms one can make about the story. One: it's didactic. I agree, it is didactic. Now, "you shouldn't beat up people until they're comatose and shouldn't use bigoted epithets towards them either" is--hopefully--a message that everyone can get behind; I don't think anyone, even the Puppies, were critical of "Dinosaur" because it was harsh on the villains.

There are other stories that make less trivial claims. When person A writes a story that asserts, or even takes for granted, "every right-thinking person should believe X, only an utter troglodyte would believe Y," and person B (who believes Y) reads this, their reaction might be "this is insulting to me, because I don't agree with it," or "because of the didacticism about X, this is difficult to enjoy overall." And I've definitely been in that position.

In cases when the position being presented is something that everyone believes already, more likely reactions are "the story's conflict is kind of boring because everything is very clear-cut," or "the author seems to expect us to be impressed by the bold stance on X, but X isn't actually bold, they're arguing against a strawman/woman/entity." It's not impossible to write a good story that happens to be didactic, but in general, I think it does add an extra layer of difficulty (whether or not the moral is something everyone agrees on, there are easy parts and difficult parts to both approaches). And, of course, none of this justifies abusing or harassing authors who choose to do so, this should go without saying.

But a more relevant criticism of "Dinosaur," and of the fandom sentiment that led it to win a major award for speculative fiction, is that...it's arguably not speculative fiction. Now, I just said that the story-within-a-story clearly is science fiction. But the frame story is not. And, in my opinion, a story set in the mundane world doesn't become speculative merely by having subjunctive what-ifs. You could write a picture book about a kid who takes the bus to school and daydreams, "if I had a dinosaur, I would ride it to school;" I don't think that makes it a science fiction story. But nothing about the world in which the narrator and her love interest "actually" live suggest that that's a world where dinosaurs regularly perform on Broadway or humans transform into flowers, and in that sense, I would not call it SF. And so the fact that it won a Nebula suggests that the voters were much more impressed by the didacticism, which I find disappointing.

So with that, overly wordly, background, I want to talk about another short story Hugo/Nebula nominee from this year, one that several of my friends really liked: "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather." (Major spoilers below.)

( Spoilers )

Mostly tangential: the "fake documentation" format lends itself to a lot of fake links, for instance, this is a thing:

Listen to the Kingston Trio: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to Joan Baez: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to Windhollow Faire: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to Steeleye Span: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to the Grateful Dead: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to Metallica: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to Moby K. Dick: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to Jack White: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to the Decemberists: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”

Listen to Cyrus Matheson: “Where Broken Hearts Do Gather” [FLAGGED by BonnieLass67][UNFLAGGED by LyricSplainer ModeratorBot]

Full Lyrics for “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (traditional) (7 contributors, 95 notes, 68 comments, 19 reactions)

(see disambiguation for other versions)

(see related songs)

At 8 cents a word (the former cutoff for SFWA's "pro" threshold, I'm not sure what Uncanny's rate was at the time this was published, it's 10 cents now), that would earn you $9.84. :D

I'm teasing, but I also feel like some of my reaction is (uncalled for) sour grapes. Like, submission guidelines will say, "make sure it's polished, don't be too verbose, send only your best work!" And I feel like, if I tried to write a document with lots of tangential annotations, or put effort into rhyming an universe poem ("Oaken Hearts" doesn't rhyme, but it's a ballad, a lot of them don't anyway, so that's not a criticism), it would just be like "lol nope." Which, obviously, Sarah Pinsker is a pro and I am not a pro! I do not want to get an overinflated view of my mediocre efforts! But (and this is more relevant for something like the Escape Pod flash) when I see people who do similar things to me, mine fails, and theirs gets a pat on the back, I get frustrated because I wish I could be more specific about identifying what they have that I don't have. (And it's entirely possible, in some cases, that what they have is "ideological smugness" and I don't even want it, it would just be good to know!)

(This post is twice as long as "Dinosaur." I can either communicate in one-liner snarky aside mode or WALL OF TEXT mode, there is no middle option.)

Recently some of my colleagues mentioned they were going to try to do /r/fantasy's bingo, where you read 25 books from different authors fitting different themes over the course of a year. (Well, or five, but that's pretty straightforward.) And I was like...I read fast enough to do this if I committed, but I'm probably not going to commit, because I have all these e-books on my computer I haven't read. And the library left mask mandates in place for a long time and I'm not super interested in in-person browsing while those are still up. (Although they actually un-mandated them as of late February, I don't know if I was caught up on that, but that's my bad.)

And then I started looking into e-readers, because what if they're actually less eye-strainy and more portable than laptops? So long story short, I'm getting an e-reader soon. It might be a terrible idea, it might be a sunk-cost fallacy, it might still be impossible with migraines, but oh well! That's not what I need recommendations on.

What I need recommendations on is, if you're not walking up and down the aisles and maybe sometimes skimming the last page even though it won't make sense to get a feel for tone, how do you find new-to-you e-books of interest? There's a lot of new speculative stuff I can sort of tell won't be to my taste, and that's fine, I'd rather find a new author I love and devour a whole series by them than complete a bingo with "eating my vegetables" stuff. But I'm obviously years behind the curve here, so...advice?

(I may also do a list of "here's recent-ish stuff I enjoyed, here's stuff I tried and didn't like," in case that's useful. Are any of the review aggregators good for building predictions based on both those sets?)

I try not to double-post too often, but fortuitous coincidence. I've been reading a book called "The Baseball 100," which is Joe Posnanski's subjective list of the greatest players in baseball history, with a lot of tangents/asides. In the context of how Roberto Clemente was a trailblazer on behalf of Puerto Ricans and Latino players more generally, he mentions that Orlando Cepeda was known as the "Baby Bull" because his father, Perucho Cepeda, was first "the Bull." On Perucho:

He crushed line drives into gaps. He ran with abandon. He was a shortstop and, by reputation, an amazing one. He played with unbridled fury. At different times, he was called Puerto Rico's Ty Cobb and Puerto Rico's Babe Ruth--one writer called him Puerto Rico's Babe Cobb, as if being compared to only one of the great American baseball legends was not enough.

This is (amazingly) going to tie into my Farscape recap, so stand by.

I was recently doing some Wikipedia research and learned that when Kurt Gödel left Vienna for the last time in late 1939, he travelled to Princeton the long way, because World War II was already making an Atlantic transit infeasible. He took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Japan, then sailed to San Francisco, and then crossed the US by train!

Fortuitously, I found a new Gödel biography shortly after, although this saga doesn't get much more elaboration. There are, however, too many funny asides about math/philosophy/history to quote. I'll go with this one:

During the Circle's discussions, Neurath would constantly try to enforce discipline by banging his fist furiously on the table and interrupting if anyone dared utter one of the words on his long list of proscribed terms, such as "idea," "ideal," even "reality." He ultimately tried the patience even of the ever-patient Schlick, who would plead, "Dear Neurath, please permit us!" Neurath responded by making a small card with the letter "M" on it which he would silently hold up whenever the discussions strayed into the forbidden area of metaphysics. After several weeks of this he announced, "I can abbreviate the procedure still further if I instead hold up a card with 'non-M' on it when you don't speak metaphysics."

And then I happened across "The Last Shadow," the culmination of the Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow series. I hadn't known that this was published this year, possibly because people in my circles aren't keeping up with new Orson Scott Card releases, possibly because I'm lazy about getting new physical books. Anyway, the last two Ender/Bean books, "Ender in Exile" and "Shadows in Flight," were released in 2008 and 2012 respectively (and "Exile" comes well before "Speaker of the Dead" in IC time), so this has been in the works for a while. (There was also "Children of the Fleet" in 2017 which was "what happened to Battle School after the war," and was...not that great.)

( Spoilers for the entire saga )

So some people I've heard discussing Dune upon a reread have been like "eh, I liked it at first, but it hasn't aged well because I'm more enlightened now." And I was kind of hoping to like it to just be like "bleep the haters." But...I want to have characters I can root for who make interesting decisions. And that...didn't really happen.

( More spoilers )
Anyway, here is some great fourth-wall busting from the appendix:

There is a fifth force which shaped religious belief, but its effect is so universal and profound that it deserves to stand alone.

This is, of course, space travel--and in any discussion of religion, it deserves to be written thus:

SPACE TRAVEL!

I first read Dune when I was pretty young and going through a "read lots of classic SF" stage. My mom had read it long before and was like, "there's so much dust. No water. Only dust, they have to recycle their urine and stuff. Gross." So I read it and my memory was, "look, there's not only dust, there's also political intrigue!"

Then, at Capclave last month, I saw a used copy on the freebie table, and was like, "hmm, new movie coming out, I barely remember the book, apparently it was one of the inspirations behind 'Crying Suns' which I'm really into right now...I'll snag it." And read 100 pages.

I really enjoyed Blade Runner 2049, and while I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" Arrival exactly, I felt feelings from it. (Some of my linguistics nerd buddies were not impressed with the way the alien linguistics came across there, but I was fine with it.) So I had high expectations for another Denis Villeneuve SF movie. I don't live within walking distance of a movie theater so I had to rideshare over, definitely for the first time since the pandemic.

And, it was fine? Pretty, nice cinematography, but...fine?

( Spoilers for Dune, also Arrival )

The bizarro-humor Wayside School trilogy was a favorite of mine growing up (especially volume 2, "Falling Down"). The original books were published in 1978, 1989, and 1995, so by the time I was in grade school and reading them they were a complete set. (I was about the right age for "Holes" when it came out, or a little later.)

But I did not at all expect there to be a fourth volume, released last year. And now that it's almost Yuletide-nominations season I decided to track the originals down and reread them before moving onto the "Cloud of Doom," I saw in reviews that there might be some callbacks/continuity nods.

Some random highlights:

( Sideways Stories from Wayside School )
( Wayside School Is Falling Down )
( Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger )

( Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom )
Okay, so it's more goofy humor, and less "this is the long-awaited Chekhov that will tie everything together," but that's okay, you don't need to understand how everything is connected to enjoy Wayside School. If I nominate it it'll probably be at least Dana and Miss Zarves, not sure though.

Just finished random used-bookstore pickup "Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants, and Stars," by Bob Motley--a memoir of his career umpiring in the Negro Leagues. This was written in 2007, at the time he was described as the last surviving ump from the era. (Looks like he died in 2017.)

I enjoyed it-- a lot of larger-than-life personages, baseball-related silliness, and snapshots of life across decades (he was a Marine and fought in the Battle of Okinawa). And the racist incidents he faced along the way are sobering without being preachy--this was his life, and as ugly as some of the behavior he encountered was, it's also heartening that he did witness a lot of change in his life.

Anyway, the there-was-only-one-bed trope strikes again! Buck O'Neil was a longtime manager and usually a fairly easygoing one, he almost never got thrown out of a game. However, one day he lost his cool and started swearing at Motley, who ejected him. But then after the game, Motley realized that he didn't have a place to stay--he travelled with the visiting Kansas City Monarchs, and their new secretary had forgotten or didn't know to book him a room. There was only one hotel open to black guests in Jacksonville, Florida, and it was booked, so he was like "I either have to sleep on a bench somewhere or awkwardly face O'Neil and ask for a room with the team." O'Neil very politely said "it's fine, ask the hotel manager for a key to my room." Motley showed up and was like "oh no, only one bed, barely enough room to sleep on the floor either. I'll just...face the wall and pretend to be asleep when O'Neil shows up." But an hour later, fortunately (?) O'Neil also turned his back toward Motley and fell asleep right away.

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Entries tagged with books

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, by Brandon Sanderson

99 Variations on a Proof (Philip Orling)

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward

The Worst Journey in the World

Narratives

Polar explorers fandom where you at

Troll the ancient Yuletide carol

More Turtledove

The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler

Hamilton redux

Three things make a post

Poem linkspam

Frame stories, didacticism, body horror, sour grapes...

How do you browse for e-books?

Baseball history

Books: "Journey to the Edge of Reason," "The Last Shadow"

Dune (continued)

Dune

Wayside School - revisited

Baseball and tropes