betony

So I read the Matthew Stover Revenge of the Sith novelization ---

portico: why
me: i don't have to justify myself

-- but the actual reason is that I didn't want to listen to the A More Civilized Age podcast episodes about it without having read it myself to form my own opinions first, and the approximately eleven hours they spend talking about it gives me two full weeks of podcast time to fill my walk to work. Also I'd heard from a couple different people that it was unexpectedly good!

With affectionate respect to the people who told me this, I did not actually find this to be true. In fact I found the book somewhat worse than I expected. However, it is unexpectedly gay, and I do understand how people can substitute the one thing for the other. If you care about Anakin and Obi-Wan, let me tell you, you are in luck, so does Matthew Stover. If you care about Anakin and Padme -- scratch that. If you care about Padme in any capacity, you are less in luck. This is the most boring I Care About Nothing But Being A Love Interest Padme Amidala that I've ever seen and that includes the Padme in the film, where Natalie Portman is at least attemptiong to project 'I'm trapped in this narrative get me out of here' with her eyes. My frustrations here are exacerbated by having relatively recently read the Mon Mothma book that succeeded (to my mind) in making Mon Mothma a complex and compelling political figure who is often kind of a failure. I would love to see a Padme who's a complex and compelling failure of a political figure, which is the way I think she often comes across in the Clone Wars TV show ... not necessarily on purpose .... but someone could write her that way on purpose ...

But, on the other hand, I had no real reason to expect the Revenge of the Sith novelization could or should be political thriller; this is a book that is 50% fight scene by volume. Indeed the first 30% of the book is One Long Action Sequence. My understanding is that this is because the original script, from which Matthew Stover was working, is also 30% one long action sequence that got cut down to five minutes in the actual film. I'm sorry but this IS very funny, I sympathize deeply with this poor man desperately trying to pad out a lightsaber fight to fill three chapters with extensive discussion of forms like it's the duel in The Princess Bride, only to get to the first screening and go 'god damn it!'

Anyway. It's fine. If they tell you it's a critical text in the Star Wars universe I think you might want to take that with some grains of salt, but then again, I think the most critical text in the Star Wars universe is Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season Two Episode Three: The Solitary Clone so you might want to take anything I say with some grains of salt. But do you want a page of Obi-Wan thinking about Anakin's ass? This book will indeed give that to you.

Well. Sometimes TV betrays you, but there's always books.

*****

( books! )

To make a very long story short, there was a discussion in another hobbyist community I'm part of (not the fanfic world, but it's had similar issues in recent years about "hey, how do we establish clear rules to prevent people from using LLMs in our creative writing projects") about LLM detectors, and someone mentioned that recently, he had found a program called "Pangram" to be powerful and effective. So I was just screwing around looking to see how recent/well-regarded that was. Instead of information about the program, I wound up skimming stuff about actual pangrams, like "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." And then it pointed me to one of the greatest natural history papers ever published. (The title is a pangram.)

I do think there is a particular charm, a particular interest, in a biographer who is really visibly in love with their subject. Like, you probably wouldn't want it in every biography. But it's nice to know that the author really extremely wants to be there. It gives an enjoyable sort of tension to the reading experience: at what point is the book going to go off-the-rails because the author has spontaneously transmigrated back to 1931 in a doomed attempt to alter the course of history and fix Buster Keaton's Hollywood career with the power of her passion alone? It could happen! It feels like everything has been foreshadowing it!

Obviously Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the of the Twentieth Century does not in fact go off the rails in this way, it does actually remain an interesting and readable biography that uses Keaton's life and career as a jumping-off point to explore the times in which he lived. In the book's introduction, Stevens explains that her fascination with Keaton is such that whenever I heard about something that took place between 1895 and 1966, I found myself trying to fit that event or phenomenon into the puzzle of his life and work. (She also uses the introduction to share a poem she wrote about Keaton. It's not bad!) Anyway, this is a pretty fruitful methodology that leads her to down various side paths to explore not just the history of early cinema but other twentieth-century touchstones such as changing child labor laws, vaudeville and minstrel shows, the rise of Alcoholics' Anonymous, and the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald.*

Often these aren't things that directly impacted Keaton -- Keaton never participated in AA, for example; by the time the program started to gain popularity, Keaton had already hit his rock bottom and come out the other side -- but they run along parallel tracks, such that Keaton's life casts a mirror on the phenomenon or vice versa, or there's an interesting alternate pathway to be imagined where they did indeed intersect. Keaton and Chaplin only worked together once, but you can't help but compare/contrast their trajectories; Keaton and Fitzgerald may never even have met at all, but the downward arcs of their careers were both intertwined with MGM executive Irving Thalberg, on whom Fitzgerald based his last novel.

(Also, it can't have helped with Fitzgerald's fascination, says Stevens, that Thalberg was also extraordinarily good-looking, slight-framed and serious-faced, with large, liquid brown eyes and wavy black hair -- an appearance not unlike that of a certain slapstick comedian whose contract his company had just acquired. We DON'T know they met but we DO know that if they did, Fitzgerald would CERTAINLY have thought Keaton was hot!)

It feels, in other words, like exactly what it is -- a book written by a person whose obsession with one individual has led them down a number of other interesting rabbitholes, to fruitful if not entirely cohesive results. If Keaton had been a fictional character, this might have been a 120K fanfic with a number of beautifully researched, oddly specific chapters. Because Keaton is a real person, we got this book. I had a great time!

"Le Guin was a visionary who wrote a really deep and literary novel about gender and sexuality and how much of it is a social construct or whatever": I sleep
"Le Guin was an Antarctica fangirl who had opinions about the 1980s TV series about Shackleton and Scott and wrote a story about two guys on a slightly homoerotic eighty-one day sledge trek": REAL SHIT

Premise: Genly Ai is the ambassador from the Ekumen (alliance of thousands of societies across eighty-plus planets) to the planet of Gethen, aka "Winter" for its frigid weather. He starts off in the country of Karhide, which seems like a comparatively backwards monarchy; the prime minister, Harth rem ir Estraven, says "Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel." After meeting with no success in Karhide after two years--and after Estraven gets fired and exiled for supporting him--Ai tries again in neighboring Orgoreyn, which is more of a sprawling bureaucracy with guaranteed employment for everyone and heated rooms. Maybe more promising? Nope, they send him to be interned and abused by the secret police. Eventually Estraven rescues him; there's a lot of culture shock and miscommunication, but Ai finally comes to believe that Estraven really does believe in the cosmopolitan mission of the Ekumen in contrast to smallminded nationalism.

Okay, so what about the sex stuff. Gethenians are sexless most of the time; for a few days every month, during their reproductive years, they go into "kemmer," and develop sex organs, with a random chance of being male or female on any given occasion. This is accompanied by an intense physical drive to reproduce, so they partner up with someone else in kemmer. (At least in this book, though maybe not in the spinoff stories, all of the couplings are male-female.) If the female partner gets pregnant, those sex characteristics persist through the pregnancy and gestation period, otherwise both parties become androgynous again for the next month.

Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.
Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.
...They do not see each other as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?

I'm unconvinced! Humans have a long track record of finding ways to oppress each other that have no grounding in scientific fact; I usually see "owner/chattel" language referencing racist slavery systems. I don't see why similar bigotry wouldn't exist in a place like Gethen. While Gethen has small-scale skirmishes, assassinations, secret police brutality, etc., they've never actually had an all-out war, which Ai seems to think is related to the "no rape, no subjugation" system. And while we often talk about babies as "is it a boy or a girl," we also often see birth announcements with babies' height and weight, which is really not at all something we do with adults. It's because they don't have language or personality traits or anything to communicate with us yet that we go with vital stats instead.

But where it really didn't feel as radical as advertised/feared is that all the chapters (even the ones that aren't directly narrated by Ai) use "he," "man," "brother," etc. as default. Even the spaceships are "she"!

"...it is not human to be without shame and without desire."

"I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, outlook, ethics, manners--almost everything...[women] don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers."

The Ekumen have instantaneous interplanetary communication, and telepathic language that makes lying impossible. At times it seems utopian, although there was a war a couple centuries ago. I really don't believe that social stereotypes about what roles men and women should play would continue to be this pervasive across thousands of cultures.

"The Left Hand of Darkness" was written in 1969. By 1983 we get Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in English," which goes disturbingly far in making the point that using 'he' as default is kinda messed up. A couple years later (1985), Hofstadter writes:

My feeling about nonsexist English is that it is like a foreign language that I am learning. I find that even after years of practice, I still have to translate sometimes from my native language, which is sexist English. I know of no human being who speaks Nonsexist as their native tongue. It will be very interesting to see if such people come to exist. If so, it will have taken a lot of work by a lot of people to reach that point.

For me, reading this in the 21st century, it feels really bizarre--I think my native dialect is much closer to Nonsexist English than Hofstadter could have predicted. The way I generally talk about people I don't know, or only know as streams of text coming through a computer screen, is as singular they: "whoever wrote this is an idiot and they should be fired." (This usage has a very long history in English; I draw a distinction between this and situations where a specific person requests to be referred to as singular they consistently, but some people will lump these in as the same thing.)

Apparently Le Guin was responsive to this criticism and changed the way she handled Gethen in later stories, but I can only judge it on what's in front of me, and the use of "he," to me, says a lot more about the world of 1969 than the world of Winter. (I'm going to use "he," "brother," etc. for the rest of this review, but take this with a grain of salt.)

Anyway, obviously there are a lot of taboos from our world that don't translate into Gethen society. Siblings are allowed to kemmer together, but they can't vow a monogamous relationship--after one of them has a child, that's it, they have to break up.

( spoilers )
Okay, now for the fun part, the sledging!

"What for?"
"Curiosity, adventure." He hesitated and smiled slightly. "The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life," he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations.

I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

If I were to project this onto my Antarctica faves (ignore this part if you don't know or care who these people are): Ai is more in the role of Cherry-Garrard, who at first feels less able to cope with the physical demands of sledging, but as the survivor, is responsible for putting together his recollections in the past tense, blending the perspective of what he felt at the time and what he has learned since. Estraven is a combination of Bowers (shorter but surprisingly durable, incredible grasp of logistics and food supply, which is necessary for winter travel) and Wilson (insists on routine and patience, even when it drives Ai up the wall):

The business of setting up camp, making everything secure, getting all the clinging snow off one's outer clothing, and so on, was trying. Sometimes it did not seem worthwhile. It was so late, so cold, one was so tired, that it would be much easier to lie down in a sleeping-bag in the lee of the sledge and not bother with the tent. I remember how clear this was ot me on certain evenings, and how bitterly I resented my companion's methodical, tyrannical insistence that we do everything and do it correctly and thoroughly. I hated him at such times, with a hatred that rose straight up out of the death that lay within my spirit. I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.

Estraven also keeps a journal of the trek, to keep in touch with his family back home. Oftentimes this is little more than the date and reports on temperature. Ai teaches him mindspeech, but he's careful not to let any hint of that slip into the journal, and so it's clear that we're getting different points of view on the same event. Again, the contrast between "one party's recollection after the fact" and "people's real-time chronicles, which are probably brief and to the point because of the weather," is very much in the spirit of polar narratives.

I don't want to push this too far, but I think that the contrast between the nationalistic goals of the Karhide and Orgoreyn factions, and Ai's mission, which eventually becomes Estraven's, being both universal with the Ekumen and an intensely personal relationship, probably is making a broader point about exploration in our world.

Likewise, one of my favorite quotes from last year's bingo was in Le Guin's "Paradises Lost":

History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.

If it's not already obvious, I have been feeling a lot of emotions about Antarctica in the past few months or so, and in particular, I do think it's important that there is one place in the world that has nothing in the way of "History" with a capital H--warfare and oppression and suchlike--but does have a track record of science and exploration and friendship and narratives. Maybe this distinction is shallow or doesn't matter to other people. But I keep thinking of that quote, even though I know perfectly well it has nothing to do with Antarctica per se. Having read this book, I feel a little better about that connection; maybe Le Guin wouldn't think I'm crazy for it. :)

Bingo: I think the safest/most obvious connection is Politics. For various stretches of the squares, I think there are cases to be made for Unusual Transportation (sledge hauling), Vacation Spot (if you're an Antarctica nerd), Explorers/Rangers, First Contact (there were stealth observers sent to Gethen before, but Ai is the first to proclaim himself as an alien). I also think there's a case to be made that it should be eligible for exactly one of "Trans or Nonbinary Protagonist" or "Non-Human Protagonist," but it's in a quantum state of superposition and you can't determine which is which for most of the month...

Scheduling worked out, I was able to accompany my parents on an incredible globe-trotting vacation, so that's been amazing. This almost perfectly overlapped with @threeweeksfordreamwidth ! So a couple days lated, copied from @maevedarcy, a fun meme.

(PS: new icon is from @reeby10, thank you so much!)

( Read more... )

I don't know that Angela Thirlwell's Rosalind: A Biography of Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine was particularly mind-blowing for me as a text in terms of new knowledge or insights on As You Like It. However, it certainly was satisfying for me to read, in the way it is always satisfying to read a book with someone who passionately agrees with you about a mildly contrarian fannish opinion, like:

Angela Thirlwell: I simply think Rosalind is the absolute top-tier Shakespeare heroine
Me [nodding vigorously]: How true!
Angela Thirlwell: she is so witty and clever and in absolute total narrative control of her text and also doing gender like nobody else in Shakespeare
Me [nodding vigorously]: I think everyone who puts on an As You Like It should read your book!
Angela Thirwell: and As You Like It is a brilliant work that hangs together brilliantly in its entirety
Me [nodding en--pausing]: well I'm not sure I agree entirely with that
Angela Thirlwell: and here's my chapter on Rosalind's Daughters which includes every literary heroine I've ever loved. Elizabeth Bennet is kind of a Rosalind when you think about it.
Me [nodding politely]: I see, I see. Do you have any evidence for that?
Angela Thirlwell: Well, no. But! I believe it in my heart. Because Rosalind is the best!
Me [nodding vigorously]: She's the best!

The part that was probably most interesting for me in terms of actual new thoughts about Rosalind and As You Like It was the contextualization of the play in in terms of when, exactly, it was written, and what other plays it sits alongside in its canonical period, including some that are relatively unfamiliar to me -- I don't actually have a great constant sense in my head of Shakespeare's timeline (other than the obvious TEMPEST IS THE LAST) and the Great Chronological DWJ Project has made me much more interested in tracing the way a train of thought evolves over the course of somebody's work. It's interesting to see Rosalind and Viola as different ways of working out a concept that begins all the way back in Two Gentlemen of Verona; Thirlwell makes much of the fact that Viola is stressed and and serious and poetic whereas Rosalind is almost always speaking in comic prose, and takes charge of her own epilogue. Indeed she never forgets to remind us that Rosalind has the epilogue. You can tell what Thirlwell's favorite bits of the play are because she will quote them at least times in the text in order to prove five different points, blissfully unconcerned with repetition. I personally did not need to return quite so many times to the Bay of Portugal but I guess even the fact that Rosalind speaks the greatest percentage of her play of any Shakespeare heroine [good for her!] does not provide that many Rosalind lines to quote from.

Anyway. Do I think you ought to read this book if not for the pleasure of nodding vigorously along with various enthusiastic statements about Rosalind? Like, do I think it will transform you into a person who nods vigorously along with enthusiastic statements about Rosalind, if you were not one previously? Who could say! Report back if you find out!

My Russian Duolingo studies came in handy reading signs in Poland!

Just got back from a fantastic 10-day Frederick-the-Great-themed trip to Germany with a sidequest in Poland! Many thanks to

selenak for driving me around.

Not optimistic I'll have time to write it up; I have to finish prepping for a co-presentation at UCLA on Friday, have a 3-hour meeting with a department chair this Wednesday, a party on Saturday to meet next week's visiting seminar presenter, and evening seminars from this presenter Monday through Thursday of next week.

But just know that I had a ton of fun! I saw everything we could find related to Frederick's boyfriends that I was interested in. Most notably Peter Keith, about whom I am writing a biography that I need to get back to work on. So you can see why I have no time to write up trips!

I miiight have time this weekend to continue my quest to buy good running shoes so that I can get back to running again.

Btw, my hamstring isn't 100%, but it's a lot better than it was 2 weeks ago. Woohoo! Knee continues to get better and worse and better and worse; I think I just need to be super careful for a really long time so that it continues to get better and better. Then someday maybe it will be robust again like it used to be, and like the other knee still is.

P.S. I went to the palace in the icon 3 times in one week on this trip!

I have succumbed to peer pressure and started rereading Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy -- well that's not true, I have reread the first book, Assassin's Apprentice, and told myself [lying] I PROBABLY won't go on from here, I just want to remember what's what! But it seems I will in fact be going on from here because to my surprise I thought Assassin's Apprentice was better than I expected or indeed remembered it being and now I want to get to the Liveship Traders trilogy, which is the one I actually actively remember as being good [citation: fourteen-year-old Becca, a notoriously unreliable narrator as we have many times established.]

The thing is I essentially remembered nothing about Assassin's Apprentice because at the time I read it I didn't really know the narrative value of the fraught emotional bond between a protagonist and their mediocre-to-bad mentor and Assassin's Apprentice is NOTHING but mediocre-to-bad mentors. This book is chockablock full of problematic adults intensely projecting their various personal traumas and failures on our young protagonist and attempting to extend him care and guidance through these various highly distorted lenses, and unfortunately their best at its best is never very good but you can't say they're not trying: not really appealing to me at fourteen but delicious to me at forty.

Assassin's Apprentice begins with the arrival of our protagonist on a royal doorstep, age sixish: this kid is the illegitimate son of the famously upright, faithful, virtuous, happily married, non-slutty heir to the throne, Prince Chivalry, and his unknown relatives have decided that it's time for the child to be Chivalry's problem. This immediately and publicly blows up the entire political situation in the country, as Chivalry and his wife subsequently remove themselves from the line of succession and retire to a remote country estate without ever interacting with the child in question.

So that's Fitz, a kid with no official status who's a walking Weird Situation For Everyone. As for his various mediocre mentors, we've got:

Burrich, who was Chivalry's overwhelmingly devoted right-hand man, and due to a one-two-three punch of inconveniently timed injury/Fitz's arrival/Chivalry's retirement has found himself demoted from Heroic Hand of the Heir to the Throne to local stablemaster and accidental foster parent to the kid who blew up his life and his boss'

Chade, the king's assassin, who started from a similar position to Fitz and has been tasked by the king with molding Fitz into just as useful a tool for the royal dynasty as Chade has been for all these years

Verity, Fitz's uncle and the new responsible-but-overwhelmed heir to the throne, a pleasant and dutiful man with minimal emotional intelligence, who is always sort of absently nice to Fitz until the Kingdom's Problems start Eating Him Alive and suddenly things become enjoyably fraught as the potential increasingly arises that perhaps the Kingdom's Problems would eat Verity alive a little less if he let them eat Fitz alive a little more, but he is not going to do that! because he has ethics! but they both know that the possibility is there!!

Lady Patience, Chivalry's wife, who shows up midway through the book when Fitz is a teenager like 'oops possibly this child should have been parented by us? who says you can't fix the failures of the past! I'm doing it right now!'

What I find charming about Lady Patience in particular is that it's really obvious that to Chivalry she was his beautiful carefree manic pixie dream girl and to everyone else she is a nightmare. In fact all these people are sort of nightmares, and they all do care deeply about Fitz, and are also all failing him in important ways that have to do with their own deeply personal blind spots. The book's strength is in the evenhanded way it looks at these people and their strengths and their failures, and lets both the love and the mistakes matter equally.

The book's weakness is in that Robin Hobb apparently decided that since she had all these deeply flawed sympathetic characters, she also needed some actual villains that no one could possibly feel sympathetic about. There's an evil prince who wants to usurp the throne, and there are also some evil pirates who are kidnapping people from the kingdom and turning them into Soulless Monsters, or rather what

blotthis accurately describes as video game NPCs that you don't need to feel bad about killing. The fact that Hobb goes to great lengths to explain how everyone is very distraught about the situation and does some failed experiments to ensure that there's no way to turn these people back from being soulless monsters and you really truly don't need to feel bad about killing them really just makes it worse.

Also, I think it's important to note that Robin Hobb really is better than most of her peers at thinking about the practical requirements of domestic animals in a Nineties Eurofantasy environment; the proper care of horses and dogs forms a significant underlying element of the book and occasionally becomes a major plot point, especially since Fitz's Special Secret Skill is dog telepathy [Burrich thinks From Personal Experience this is an evil perversion that will ruin Fitz's life and that he must train out of Fitz as much as possible] [this is definitely not a metaphor for anything] [Robin Hobb wants to know how you could you possibly ask that]. Anyway the flip side of this is that Robin Hobb will Not hesitate to kill a puppy. Never think she won't do it. She has a knife to another puppy's throat right now. ( spoilers )

This is the sequel to Jade City, picking up a year or so after that book ended and continuing over the course of several years. Although our protagonists, the No Peak Clan, and their enemies the Mountain are still nominally at piece, international powers are continuing to fight over access to jade, and so a conflict that was at first limited to one city becomes increasingly global. There are a lot of peripheral characters, but it's a case of "even when I don't remember exactly what that guy's name is, I remember his role in the plot," it wasn't difficult to keep track of the main plotlines.

After the events of the first book, Anden is no longer willing to handle jade, and so Hilo sends him to the country of Espenia to study abroad and live in the Kekonese-Espenian diaspora community. His description of culture shock, and seeing how some Kekonese traditions and rituals get recombined and changed as part of the new Kekonese-Espenian culture, felt compelling and well-written. Similarly, Shae's thoughts about the pressures women leaders face, and the risks of being overly aggressive or overly accomodating, in a male-dominated field, were interesting without being didactic.

A Green Bone leader couldn’t be soft or hesitant, especially if she was a woman and people were expecting her to fail.

Social progress, Kekonese-style, Shae mused. Equal opportunity to die by the blade.

So I enjoyed the first part of Anden's plotline, watching him see what it means to be a "Green Bone" in Espenia, and his relationships with people there. Unfortunately, where things lagged for me were in introducing the "Crews" (local Espenian organized crime groups). We already had organized crime elements going on with the clans in Kekon; moving to another country just for more of the same was underwhelming. So the one customs official who's like "excuse me, we're not allowed to take bribes/gifts from passengers" was a nice touch, at least the entire system isn't broken.

Duels are a great opportunity for clever one-liners:

“Old Uncle in Heaven, judge me the greener of your kin tomorrow, if it be so,” she murmured in prayer to Jenshu the Monk, the One Who Returned, the patron god of Green Bones. She paused. “And if you judge otherwise, at least give me credit for a dramatic attempt.”

Cultural stereotypes:

When there’s a problem to be solved, the Espenian tries money first, then resorts to violence. The Kekonese tries violence first, then resorts to money.

Last time around, I was like, "the other countries aren't totally expies, which is good." This time, I was approaching it more from a perspective of "okay, if this is fantasy!USA and fantasy!China, what does that mean?" Kekon is not nearly as big, relative to its world, as RL mainland China. But the musings about "okay we'll send students to study abroad" "how will we prevent them from just staying overseas?" "make it a condition of their scholarship money that they come home and work for us for a few years" and "we can't just go overseas to assassinate someone, even if he's terrible, that's kind of against international law" are still, uh, very relevant.

I also like how the Mountain and No Peak sort of go back and forth in their pragmatic uses of internationalism/nationalism, without being completely indistinguishable--it's the more xenophobic Mountain who are politically in favor of the bill allowing more refugee migration, while No Peak, even though they're more in favor of opening up to the world, wind up opposing it. Hilo is such a villainous character at times that a version of the story written from the Mountain's POV could probably be equally compelling and sympathetic.

Now there was even limited reciprocal membership privileges with the Janloon City Club on the other side of the Financial District, which had long been the old boys’ social club of the Mountain clan. Even during the recent period of clan war, money was more fluid than blood. The Green Bones of the two clans might be deadly enemies, but their tribute-paying businessmen remained able to network over drinks at elite establishments.

A couple of my nitpicks from the previous review still stand (weird jump into present tense for describing Kekonese festivals; the sex scenes early on are awkward). Sex notwithstanding, the romantic relationship arcs in general are handled well.

( Spoilery thoughts: )

Bingo: Vacation Spot (there's even an in-universe afterword written as a "tourist guide!"), Cat Squasher, Author of Color, probably Politics. I don't think it quite counts for "Feast Your Eyes on This": "food or a meal is significant to a story's plot." Not significant, but lots more descriptions of various meals than most of what I read.

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betony

October 2025

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Allow Me to Retort, Cart & Cwidder, Justice, A Lady for All Seasons, The Martian, 3 more & 1 DNF

Wiki Wanderings: I Got It There Then

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(SFF Bingo): The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Superlatives game: Terra Nova

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(SFF Bingo): Jade War, by Fonda Lee

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