The snowmageddon has kept me indoors for over a week now! The cats and I long for the sunshine.
*****
( books! )
*****
( books! )
I don't do star ratings, because it's really hard for me to sum up what does and doesn't work about a book on a one-dimensional axis. But one of the things that often comes up in these reviews is "does it stick the landing." Because sometimes my assessment would be like "boring first half, 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 because it finally gets good." Or "compelling prose, 3.5 stars, rounded down because the end is a total anticlimax." This really impacts my reading experience.
Singer Distance is a book that sticks the landing. There are digressions that are less engaging than the SF stuff, like, flashbacks to the narrator's teenage years and pranks that local kids play on his dad's farm. But it all comes together in a way that I didn't see coming but then totally should have, which is the sign of doing something right. There is closure to the plot questions we have, I'm not sitting there thinking "well that was a waste." So it gets the rounding-up seal of approval that way.
Premise: the "channels" on Mars really were canals; there are intelligent Martians, and they're sometimes communicative. From the 1890s to the 1930s, Martians carve large-scale displays that Earth can see with telescopes, and correctly interpret them to be mathematical formulae. Earth responds with similarly large-scale constructions.
Rick is madly in love, and he proposes, but she tells him to finish his own degree and not bask in her reflected glory. Then she basically ghosts him. Thirteen years later, in 1973, Rick has to go on another cross-country road trip, this time without his buddies in tow.
There's opportunities for US regional humor:
This is the best explanation of "Singer Distance" we get, and I actually think it's a pretty good one in terms of "fake math":
How realistic is this? In my experience it's pretty common to begin college at 18 and, if you go directly to grad school from undergrad, start that at 22 or so. Let's say Crystal is more prodigious than her peers and skipped a grade early on. I still don't think it would be super likely to see a four year gap between her and her colleagues? Was it different for people in the sixties?
More generally, I find the dynamics of "socially awkward genius/"person who has practical and social skills" as a romance trope can be kind of tiresome. This version has a woman in the first slot and a man in the second instead of the reverse, props. But I don't think we get a compelling sense of what Crystal sees in Rick. She treats him (and other people close to her) with incredible callousness for those thirteen years. And then he's extremely forgiving, like, "I would rather have her in my life than be estranged from her for no reason, maybe she just went crazy from too much math and can't help it," but it felt unearned. Their relationship parallels the Earth-Mars one; Mars is aloof and normally doesn't bother to communicate with Earth unless Earth can solve their puzzles. Crystal says that maybe Earth just needs to change the conversational topic. In the Earth-Mars case, it might work, although Mars is destroying/turning off/ignoring their rovers, so it still might not. I'm not convinced that "the relationship between unequals" really works for Crystal and Rick, even if Crystal claims she's in awe of his practical skills.
Bingo: I'll probably use this for the "recycle a bingo square" (there's plenty that it could count for, eg, "Published in 2022," hard mode as Chatagnier's first published novel). I've been very lucky in not needing to fall back on that one yet!
If you're interested in using it for this year's card, arguments could be made for "a book in parts" (there are three parts, longer than traditional chapters, but they aren't subdivided into actual chapters). It's not dwelled on in detail, but Crystal and her parents were refugees from fascism in the WWII era, so arguably "stranger in a strange land." If you really want to stretch it, maybe "Impossible Places," because what if small distances and large distances are actually, like, indistinguishable, dude. Big spoilers:
( the bingo square is a spoiler )
Singer Distance is a book that sticks the landing. There are digressions that are less engaging than the SF stuff, like, flashbacks to the narrator's teenage years and pranks that local kids play on his dad's farm. But it all comes together in a way that I didn't see coming but then totally should have, which is the sign of doing something right. There is closure to the plot questions we have, I'm not sitting there thinking "well that was a waste." So it gets the rounding-up seal of approval that way.
Premise: the "channels" on Mars really were canals; there are intelligent Martians, and they're sometimes communicative. From the 1890s to the 1930s, Martians carve large-scale displays that Earth can see with telescopes, and correctly interpret them to be mathematical formulae. Earth responds with similarly large-scale constructions.
Within a few months a robust plurality had settled on this interpretation:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 + 2 = 4
3 + 3 = _
Our first true message from the Martians: pop quiz, kindergartners.
But then the Martians pose something about distance that befuddles all Earth's scientists, and when nobody can formulate a response, Mars goes silent. The book begins in 1960; Rick is a grad student at MIT, and his girlfriend, Crystal, thinks she's solved the equation. They and some friends go on a road trip from Boston to the Arizona desert to broadcast their answer.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 + 2 = 4
3 + 3 = _
Our first true message from the Martians: pop quiz, kindergartners.
Rick is madly in love, and he proposes, but she tells him to finish his own degree and not bask in her reflected glory. Then she basically ghosts him. Thirteen years later, in 1973, Rick has to go on another cross-country road trip, this time without his buddies in tow.
There's opportunities for US regional humor:
The great thing about Oklahoma, Priya said, was that each state after it got a little better.
Just my luck, I thought--I was trying to find the love of my life and had to rely on the goodwill of a Philadelphian.
Just my luck, I thought--I was trying to find the love of my life and had to rely on the goodwill of a Philadelphian.
I like SF, and math, and can relate to nerdy obsessive mathematicians also having interests in music and cartography and other seemingly unrelated things, so this book was a specific recommendation to me. The flip side is, I can be more critical of things I know well. It's harder for me to suspend my disbelief when it comes to "what if the way we conceptualize distance is misleading, what if there's a more meaningful sense of distance? Sometimes when you're physically close to somebody, emotionally, you're still miles away. Everything is relative, dude." That kind of faux-profundity is a hard sell.
This is the best explanation of "Singer Distance" we get, and I actually think it's a pretty good one in terms of "fake math":
Imagine a mountain range. Traditional measurement was like measuring from the base of the southernmost mountain to the base of the northernmost mountain in a straight line through the Earth, ignoring the complex topography of the thicknesses and compositions of each peak. Though she theorized that mapping the actual, exact topography of any distance was a task on par with mapping the universe, she explained how the averages could be calculated, with a detailed process that had to take into account inertial speed or acceleration, medium, and a mysterious variable the editors referred to as the Tanzer Value, but which Crystal named "Intent."
I sort of agreed with the editors, that Intent was a troublesome name for the quantity, one that both failed to help visualize how the variable operated and anthropomorphized an ineffable particle; it made distance seem subject to mood swings.
This is good. There's also a follow-up Martian message about entropy, and the humans comment, "you can't reverse the flow of a river...well actually yes you can, they literally did that in Chicago, maybe entropy isn't the whole story," which was fun. But by the time we get there there's been a lot of "how can you be so far away and I still feel so close to you??? #makesyouthink."
The discovery of intelligent Martians changes very little about Earth's history from the 1890s onwards. The world wars still happen. NASA still lands on the moon in 1969. There are eventually orbiters sent to Mars, but they abruptly lose transmission 13,000 miles away. This disinterest in alternate history makes it feel more like "litfic with SF elements" than "attractive to SF fans."
How realistic is this? In my experience it's pretty common to begin college at 18 and, if you go directly to grad school from undergrad, start that at 22 or so. Let's say Crystal is more prodigious than her peers and skipped a grade early on. I still don't think it would be super likely to see a four year gap between her and her colleagues? Was it different for people in the sixties?
More generally, I find the dynamics of "socially awkward genius/"person who has practical and social skills" as a romance trope can be kind of tiresome. This version has a woman in the first slot and a man in the second instead of the reverse, props. But I don't think we get a compelling sense of what Crystal sees in Rick. She treats him (and other people close to her) with incredible callousness for those thirteen years. And then he's extremely forgiving, like, "I would rather have her in my life than be estranged from her for no reason, maybe she just went crazy from too much math and can't help it," but it felt unearned. Their relationship parallels the Earth-Mars one; Mars is aloof and normally doesn't bother to communicate with Earth unless Earth can solve their puzzles. Crystal says that maybe Earth just needs to change the conversational topic. In the Earth-Mars case, it might work, although Mars is destroying/turning off/ignoring their rovers, so it still might not. I'm not convinced that "the relationship between unequals" really works for Crystal and Rick, even if Crystal claims she's in awe of his practical skills.
Bingo: I'll probably use this for the "recycle a bingo square" (there's plenty that it could count for, eg, "Published in 2022," hard mode as Chatagnier's first published novel). I've been very lucky in not needing to fall back on that one yet!
If you're interested in using it for this year's card, arguments could be made for "a book in parts" (there are three parts, longer than traditional chapters, but they aren't subdivided into actual chapters). It's not dwelled on in detail, but Crystal and her parents were refugees from fascism in the WWII era, so arguably "stranger in a strange land." If you really want to stretch it, maybe "Impossible Places," because what if small distances and large distances are actually, like, indistinguishable, dude. Big spoilers:
( the bingo square is a spoiler )
Like several other people on my reading list, including ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer (post here) and troisoiseaux (post here, I was compelled by the premise of I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After 28 Years In A Convent, a once-bestselling (but now long out-of-print) memoir by a British woman who entered a cloister in 1914, lived ten years as a nun, decided it wasn't for her, lived another almost twenty years as a nun out of stubbornness, and exited in 1941, having missed quite a lot of sociological developments in the interim! including talking films! and underwire bras! and not one, but two World Wars!
Obviously Baldwin did not know that WWI was about to happen right as she went into a convent, but she does explain that she came out in the middle of WWII more or less on purpose, out of an idea that it would be easier to slide herself back into things when everything was chaotic and unprecedented anyway than to try to establish a life for herself as The Weird Ex Nun in more normal times. Unclear how well this strategy paid off for her, but you can't say she didn't give it an effort. Baldwin was raised extremely upper-class -- she was related to former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, among others -- but exited the convent pretty much penniless, so while she did have a safety net in terms of various sets of variously judgmental relations who were willing to put her up, she spends a lot of the book valiantly attempting to take her place among the workers of the world. And these are real labor jobs, too -- 'ex-nun' is not a resume booster, and most of the things she felt actually qualified to do for a living based on her convent experience (librarianship, scholarship, etc) required some form of degree, so much of the work she does in this book are things like being a land girl, or working in a canteen. She doesn't enjoy these jobs, and she rarely does them long, but you have to respect her for giving it the old college try, especially when she's constantly in a state of profound and sustained culture shock.
Overall, Baldwin does not enjoy the changes to the world since she left it. She does not enjoy having gone in a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her, and come out a middle-aged woman who's missed all the milestones that everyone around her takes for granted. She does, however, profoundly enjoy her freedom, and soon begins to cherish an all-consuming dream of purchasing a Small House of her Very Own where she can do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants. After decades in a convent, you can hardly blame her for this. On the other hand -- fascinatingly, to me -- it's very clear that Baldwin still somewhat idealizes convent life, despite the fact that it obviously made her deeply miserable. She has long conversations with her judgmental relatives, and long conversations with us, the reader, in which she tries to convince them/us of the real virtues of the cloister; of the spiritual value of deep, deliberate, constant self-sacrifice and self-abegnation; of the fact that it's important, vital and necessary that some people close themselves away from work in the world to focus on the exclusive pursuit of God. It is good that people do this, it's spiritual and heroic, it's simply -- unfortunately -- the only case in which she's ever known the church to be wrong in assessing who does or does not have a genuine vocation after the novice period -- not for her.
Baldwin is a fascinating and contradictory person and I enjoyed spending time with her quite a bit. I suspect she wouldn't much enjoy spending time with me; she will keep going to London and observing neutrally that it seems the streets are much more full of Jews than they were before she went into the convent, faint shudder implied. At another point she confesses that although she'd left the convent with 'definite socialist tendencies,' actually working among the working people has changed her mind for the worse: 'the people' now impressed me as full of class prejudice and an almost vindictive envy-hatred-malice fixation towards anyone who was richer, cleverer, or in any way superior to themselves. Still, despite her preoccupations and prejudices, her voice is interesting, and deeply eccentric, and IMO she's worth getting to know. This is a woman, an ex-nun, who takes Le Morte D'Arthur as her beacon of hope and guide to life. Le Morte! You really can't agree with it, but how can you not be compelled?
osprey_archer (post here) and troisoiseaux (post here, I was compelled by the premise of I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After 28 Years In A Convent, a once-bestselling (but now long out-of-print) memoir by a British woman who entered a cloister in 1914, lived ten years as a nun, decided it wasn't for her, lived another almost twenty years as a nun out of stubbornness, and exited in 1941, having missed quite a lot of sociological developments in the interim! including talking films! and underwire bras! and not one, but two World Wars! Obviously Baldwin did not know that WWI was about to happen right as she went into a convent, but she does explain that she came out in the middle of WWII more or less on purpose, out of an idea that it would be easier to slide herself back into things when everything was chaotic and unprecedented anyway than to try to establish a life for herself as The Weird Ex Nun in more normal times. Unclear how well this strategy paid off for her, but you can't say she didn't give it an effort. Baldwin was raised extremely upper-class -- she was related to former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, among others -- but exited the convent pretty much penniless, so while she did have a safety net in terms of various sets of variously judgmental relations who were willing to put her up, she spends a lot of the book valiantly attempting to take her place among the workers of the world. And these are real labor jobs, too -- 'ex-nun' is not a resume booster, and most of the things she felt actually qualified to do for a living based on her convent experience (librarianship, scholarship, etc) required some form of degree, so much of the work she does in this book are things like being a land girl, or working in a canteen. She doesn't enjoy these jobs, and she rarely does them long, but you have to respect her for giving it the old college try, especially when she's constantly in a state of profound and sustained culture shock.
Overall, Baldwin does not enjoy the changes to the world since she left it. She does not enjoy having gone in a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her, and come out a middle-aged woman who's missed all the milestones that everyone around her takes for granted. She does, however, profoundly enjoy her freedom, and soon begins to cherish an all-consuming dream of purchasing a Small House of her Very Own where she can do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants. After decades in a convent, you can hardly blame her for this. On the other hand -- fascinatingly, to me -- it's very clear that Baldwin still somewhat idealizes convent life, despite the fact that it obviously made her deeply miserable. She has long conversations with her judgmental relatives, and long conversations with us, the reader, in which she tries to convince them/us of the real virtues of the cloister; of the spiritual value of deep, deliberate, constant self-sacrifice and self-abegnation; of the fact that it's important, vital and necessary that some people close themselves away from work in the world to focus on the exclusive pursuit of God. It is good that people do this, it's spiritual and heroic, it's simply -- unfortunately -- the only case in which she's ever known the church to be wrong in assessing who does or does not have a genuine vocation after the novice period -- not for her.
Baldwin is a fascinating and contradictory person and I enjoyed spending time with her quite a bit. I suspect she wouldn't much enjoy spending time with me; she will keep going to London and observing neutrally that it seems the streets are much more full of Jews than they were before she went into the convent, faint shudder implied. At another point she confesses that although she'd left the convent with 'definite socialist tendencies,' actually working among the working people has changed her mind for the worse: 'the people' now impressed me as full of class prejudice and an almost vindictive envy-hatred-malice fixation towards anyone who was richer, cleverer, or in any way superior to themselves. Still, despite her preoccupations and prejudices, her voice is interesting, and deeply eccentric, and IMO she's worth getting to know. This is a woman, an ex-nun, who takes Le Morte D'Arthur as her beacon of hope and guide to life. Le Morte! You really can't agree with it, but how can you not be compelled?
Some recent(ish) stuff:
1. Tax season has begun. I am working in a mildly grotty Not The IRS office that may be the only extant business in a small building that is notionally part of a larger shopping complex on the edge of a busier commercial neighborhood. I have had three clients so far: one finished, one is on hold for missing documents, and the third is scheduled to come back with their one (1) missing document on Tuesday evening to finish their state return.
2. I have been partially yanked sideways into payroll at my day job, which is an improvement over "hi we're making you the Person Responsible For Payroll" that they tried to stick me with. I successfully resisted that, but honestly I am now feeling like I should have resisted ANY attempt to foist payroll tasks onto me. I was getting comfy with my accounts receivable work and I dislike the way payroll stuff requires more contact with management and waiting for other people to approve stuff before I can actually do anything. Ugh. I may give it two weeks and then see if I can do an, "Actually now that I have tried this out I am still really uncomfortable with it and would appreciate being released back to strictly AR work thanks."
3. I started playing Fallen London and am enjoying it immensely. :)
4. For my mental health, I am not talking about politics (except just now very briefly to say fuck ICE with a rusty spork). Please do not leave comments about the whole Everything. I am aware, and I am trying not to doom-spiral, thank you.
1. Tax season has begun. I am working in a mildly grotty Not The IRS office that may be the only extant business in a small building that is notionally part of a larger shopping complex on the edge of a busier commercial neighborhood. I have had three clients so far: one finished, one is on hold for missing documents, and the third is scheduled to come back with their one (1) missing document on Tuesday evening to finish their state return.
2. I have been partially yanked sideways into payroll at my day job, which is an improvement over "hi we're making you the Person Responsible For Payroll" that they tried to stick me with. I successfully resisted that, but honestly I am now feeling like I should have resisted ANY attempt to foist payroll tasks onto me. I was getting comfy with my accounts receivable work and I dislike the way payroll stuff requires more contact with management and waiting for other people to approve stuff before I can actually do anything. Ugh. I may give it two weeks and then see if I can do an, "Actually now that I have tried this out I am still really uncomfortable with it and would appreciate being released back to strictly AR work thanks."
3. I started playing Fallen London and am enjoying it immensely. :)
4. For my mental health, I am not talking about politics (except just now very briefly to say fuck ICE with a rusty spork). Please do not leave comments about the whole Everything. I am aware, and I am trying not to doom-spiral, thank you.
Further to this, I am happy to say that I am now at 100% of sections begun and mostly complete, ahead of the deadline I was aiming for. If it's not selected, there may be future opportunities to revise/resubmit. And there will probably be a little more padding/editing to go, but the total word count won't grow by more than about 10% of the current total.
I've archive-locked a couple old posts from years ago, since I'm borrowing/rephrasing some of that content to include there. So if you see any broken links, it's probably not you, it's me.
Google Drive automatically puts it at the top of my "suggested documents" to open. Usually it was just "you last opened it January 18," but the last couple days, in the evening, it's like "you usually open it around this time," they know my daily pattern-of-life...
I've archive-locked a couple old posts from years ago, since I'm borrowing/rephrasing some of that content to include there. So if you see any broken links, it's probably not you, it's me.
Google Drive automatically puts it at the top of my "suggested documents" to open. Usually it was just "you last opened it January 18," but the last couple days, in the evening, it's like "you usually open it around this time," they know my daily pattern-of-life...
For the first few chapters that I read, I was enjoying Ava Morgyn's The Bane Witch, as heroine Piers Corbin heroically Gone Girled herself out of an abusive marriage by faking a combo poisoning-drowning and flailed her injured way north to seek refuge with a mysterious aunt, accidentally leaving a fairly significant trail behind her. Satisfying! Suspenseful! I was looking forward to seeing how she was gonna get out of this one!
Then Piers did indeed get north to the aunt and tap into her Family Birthright of Magical Revenge Poisoning. As the actual plot geared up, the more I understood what type of good time I was being expected to have, and, alas, the more it did, the less of a good time I was having.
So the way the family magic works is that all of the Corbin women have the magical ability -- nay, compulsion! -- to eat poison ingredients and convert them internally into a toxin that they can -- nay, must! -- use to murder Bad Men. It's always Men. They're always Bad. They know the men are Bad because they are also granted magical visions explaining how Bad they are. They absolutely never kill women (there are only ever women born in this family; they have to give male babies away at birth in case they accidentally kill them with their poison, and I don't think Ava Morgyn has ever heard of a trans person) or the innocent!
...except of course that the whole family is actually threatening to kill Piers, to protect themselves, if she doesn't accept her powers and start heroically murdering Bad Men. But OTHER THAN THAT they absolutely never kill women, or the innocent, so please have no qualms on that account! Piers' aunt explains: "Yes, Piers. Whatever has happened to you, you must never forget that there are predators and there are prey. We hunt the former, not the latter."
By the way, both irredeemably Bad Men that form the focus of Badness in this book -- Piers' evil and abusive husband, and the local serial killer who is also incidentally on the loose -- are shown to have been abused in childhood by irredeemably Bad Women, but we're not getting into that. There are Predators and there are Prey!
The book wants to make sure we understand that it's very important, righteous and ethical for the Cobin family to keep doing what they're doing because everybody knows nobody believes abused women and therefore vigilante justice is the only form of justice available. There are two cops in the book, by the way. One of them is the nice and ethical local sheriff who is Piers' love interest, who is allowing her to help him hunt the local serial killer despite being suspicious that she may have poisoned several people. The other is the nice and ethical local cop investigating her supposed murder back home, who is desperate to prove she's alive because she saved his life and he's very grateful. He understands about abuse, because his name is Reyes and he's from the Big City and his mother and sister were both abused by Bad Men. The problem with these good and handsome cops is that they're actually not willing enough to murder people, which is where Piers comes in:
HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: You don't want to help me arrest him, do you? You want to kill him.
PIERS: Doesn't he deserve it?
HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: That's not for us to decide.
PIERS: Isn't it? This is our community. You're an authority in maintaining law and order, and I'm a victim of domestic and sexual violence. Surely, there is no one more qualified than us.
This book was a USA Today bestseller, which does not surprise me. It taps into exactly the part of the cultural hindbrain that loves true crime, and serial killers, and violence that you can feel good about, in an uncomplicated way, because it's being meted out to Unquestionably Bad People. Justice is when bad people suffer and die. We're not too worried about how they turned out to be bad people. There are predators, and there are prey.
Then Piers did indeed get north to the aunt and tap into her Family Birthright of Magical Revenge Poisoning. As the actual plot geared up, the more I understood what type of good time I was being expected to have, and, alas, the more it did, the less of a good time I was having.
So the way the family magic works is that all of the Corbin women have the magical ability -- nay, compulsion! -- to eat poison ingredients and convert them internally into a toxin that they can -- nay, must! -- use to murder Bad Men. It's always Men. They're always Bad. They know the men are Bad because they are also granted magical visions explaining how Bad they are. They absolutely never kill women (there are only ever women born in this family; they have to give male babies away at birth in case they accidentally kill them with their poison, and I don't think Ava Morgyn has ever heard of a trans person) or the innocent!
...except of course that the whole family is actually threatening to kill Piers, to protect themselves, if she doesn't accept her powers and start heroically murdering Bad Men. But OTHER THAN THAT they absolutely never kill women, or the innocent, so please have no qualms on that account! Piers' aunt explains: "Yes, Piers. Whatever has happened to you, you must never forget that there are predators and there are prey. We hunt the former, not the latter."
By the way, both irredeemably Bad Men that form the focus of Badness in this book -- Piers' evil and abusive husband, and the local serial killer who is also incidentally on the loose -- are shown to have been abused in childhood by irredeemably Bad Women, but we're not getting into that. There are Predators and there are Prey!
The book wants to make sure we understand that it's very important, righteous and ethical for the Cobin family to keep doing what they're doing because everybody knows nobody believes abused women and therefore vigilante justice is the only form of justice available. There are two cops in the book, by the way. One of them is the nice and ethical local sheriff who is Piers' love interest, who is allowing her to help him hunt the local serial killer despite being suspicious that she may have poisoned several people. The other is the nice and ethical local cop investigating her supposed murder back home, who is desperate to prove she's alive because she saved his life and he's very grateful. He understands about abuse, because his name is Reyes and he's from the Big City and his mother and sister were both abused by Bad Men. The problem with these good and handsome cops is that they're actually not willing enough to murder people, which is where Piers comes in:
HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: You don't want to help me arrest him, do you? You want to kill him.
PIERS: Doesn't he deserve it?
HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: That's not for us to decide.
PIERS: Isn't it? This is our community. You're an authority in maintaining law and order, and I'm a victim of domestic and sexual violence. Surely, there is no one more qualified than us.
This book was a USA Today bestseller, which does not surprise me. It taps into exactly the part of the cultural hindbrain that loves true crime, and serial killers, and violence that you can feel good about, in an uncomplicated way, because it's being meted out to Unquestionably Bad People. Justice is when bad people suffer and die. We're not too worried about how they turned out to be bad people. There are predators, and there are prey.
I think I'd seen this series mentioned somewhere before as inspiring "A Memory Called Empire" and maybe other stuff. First contact, alien linguistics stuff, sure why not, let's try.
Cherryh mentions in a foreword for the 10th anniversary that her editor was responsible for having her include the first scenes. Interesting disparity for the "book in parts" bingo square:
Part One (15 pages): A human spaceship carrying "Earth's whole damned colonial program" gets lost in space and winds up far from where they were trying to go and has to keep searching for an inhabitable solar system.
Part Two (34 pages): 150 years later. The atevi, the local species, have some technological sophistication and recognize that the appearance of the "foreign star" has something to do with the powerful machines that have recently started tearing up the terrain. From the human POV, there was a schism between the Pilots' Guild, who want to leave the atevi planet alone and look elsewhere, versus the rest of the station, who want to land and take advantage of the hospitable climate there. The latter finally decide to land and try to force the pilots' hand, but are conscientious about trying to stay out of the atevi's way. When the atevi eventually make contact, the startled human radios back to his buddies like "please don't react with force, we're really gonna try and communicate peacefully here." I liked this part, with the alternating atevi and human POVs, and wanted more.
Part Three (358 pages): 200 years after that. Bren Cameron is the paidhi, the human ambassador/translator among the atevi, while the rest of humankind lives on an island. One day an assassin breaks into his quarters, and he's forced to take precautions and eventually evacuate. Making things worse, atevi don't really have a concept of individual fondness or friendship, so he's constantly going "I kind of like these security guards, why are they treating me as if I was a child and not telling me anything that's going on...oh wait it's dangerous to project 'like' onto them, they don't do 'like.'"
Just math-wise, the back of the book says "it had been nearly five centuries" since the original spaceship disappeared. 150+200=??? Also, there are about four million humans on the planet at the time of the main plot. How enormous was the original ship?
Atevi, especially less modern ones, are very superstitious about numerical feng shui.
In addition to an absence of humanlike emotions, atevi can also be literal-minded and tend not to show facial expressions. Which made for some interesting parallels with autism, with Bren as the minority POV character being frustrated at trying to communicate to people whose brains work very differently from his. Not sure how much of that I'm just projecting.
Unfortunately, it feels like a great deal of the plot is "high-ranking atevi pressure Bren into doing something, he doesn't really have a choice but to comply, and grudgingly goes along with it." Repeat for 350 pages. You can understand his feelings of being treated like a child; it's frustrating for us, too, that he doesn't get to exercise a lot of agency. Basically he's just trying to keep up with the atevi, who are much stronger and more physically durable than him, without complaining, and hoping that he'll earn their respect that way. There's a little bit of speculation as to "maybe the aiji [political leader] is just testing me." Later, when he's in the custody of more rural, conservative atevi, it's like, are they trying to assassinate him or do they just forget how flimsy humans are? If he endures their brutal treatment enough, will he eventually win them over? He tries to protect the individuals he finds himself caring about, and then people slap him in the face because Atevi Don't Do That.
The subtext is "humans tried to stay out of the way and not do a colonialism, but after the hopeful beginnings of Part II, atevi politics were so warlike and assassination-driven that war was inevitable anyway, that happened offscreen, and the paidhi system emerged in response." But for me it was kind of like...why bother. We do finally learn a little more about why specifically Bren is being jerked around now, beyond just "it's a test," but I felt like what we learned was pretty slight, compared to his overall lack of agency.
Early on the sentence-level prose style pinged me as verbose, but I didn't flag any specific examples and it wasn't particularly egregious overall. But there are lots of sections that are just pages of Bren introspecting and moping, with no other humans around to communicate with and no atevi POV to break it up. Again, I prefer a little more agency in my main characters.
Bingo: Book in Parts, I think a case could be made for "Stranger in a Strange Land."
Cherryh mentions in a foreword for the 10th anniversary that her editor was responsible for having her include the first scenes. Interesting disparity for the "book in parts" bingo square:
Part One (15 pages): A human spaceship carrying "Earth's whole damned colonial program" gets lost in space and winds up far from where they were trying to go and has to keep searching for an inhabitable solar system.
Part Two (34 pages): 150 years later. The atevi, the local species, have some technological sophistication and recognize that the appearance of the "foreign star" has something to do with the powerful machines that have recently started tearing up the terrain. From the human POV, there was a schism between the Pilots' Guild, who want to leave the atevi planet alone and look elsewhere, versus the rest of the station, who want to land and take advantage of the hospitable climate there. The latter finally decide to land and try to force the pilots' hand, but are conscientious about trying to stay out of the atevi's way. When the atevi eventually make contact, the startled human radios back to his buddies like "please don't react with force, we're really gonna try and communicate peacefully here." I liked this part, with the alternating atevi and human POVs, and wanted more.
Part Three (358 pages): 200 years after that. Bren Cameron is the paidhi, the human ambassador/translator among the atevi, while the rest of humankind lives on an island. One day an assassin breaks into his quarters, and he's forced to take precautions and eventually evacuate. Making things worse, atevi don't really have a concept of individual fondness or friendship, so he's constantly going "I kind of like these security guards, why are they treating me as if I was a child and not telling me anything that's going on...oh wait it's dangerous to project 'like' onto them, they don't do 'like.'"
Just math-wise, the back of the book says "it had been nearly five centuries" since the original spaceship disappeared. 150+200=??? Also, there are about four million humans on the planet at the time of the main plot. How enormous was the original ship?
Atevi, especially less modern ones, are very superstitious about numerical feng shui.
The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.
...
There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number--but a million didn't seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue...
And if you play cards with them, they can and will count cards. I enjoyed that part....
There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number--but a million didn't seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue...
In addition to an absence of humanlike emotions, atevi can also be literal-minded and tend not to show facial expressions. Which made for some interesting parallels with autism, with Bren as the minority POV character being frustrated at trying to communicate to people whose brains work very differently from his. Not sure how much of that I'm just projecting.
Unfortunately, it feels like a great deal of the plot is "high-ranking atevi pressure Bren into doing something, he doesn't really have a choice but to comply, and grudgingly goes along with it." Repeat for 350 pages. You can understand his feelings of being treated like a child; it's frustrating for us, too, that he doesn't get to exercise a lot of agency. Basically he's just trying to keep up with the atevi, who are much stronger and more physically durable than him, without complaining, and hoping that he'll earn their respect that way. There's a little bit of speculation as to "maybe the aiji [political leader] is just testing me." Later, when he's in the custody of more rural, conservative atevi, it's like, are they trying to assassinate him or do they just forget how flimsy humans are? If he endures their brutal treatment enough, will he eventually win them over? He tries to protect the individuals he finds himself caring about, and then people slap him in the face because Atevi Don't Do That.
The subtext is "humans tried to stay out of the way and not do a colonialism, but after the hopeful beginnings of Part II, atevi politics were so warlike and assassination-driven that war was inevitable anyway, that happened offscreen, and the paidhi system emerged in response." But for me it was kind of like...why bother. We do finally learn a little more about why specifically Bren is being jerked around now, beyond just "it's a test," but I felt like what we learned was pretty slight, compared to his overall lack of agency.
Early on the sentence-level prose style pinged me as verbose, but I didn't flag any specific examples and it wasn't particularly egregious overall. But there are lots of sections that are just pages of Bren introspecting and moping, with no other humans around to communicate with and no atevi POV to break it up. Again, I prefer a little more agency in my main characters.
Bingo: Book in Parts, I think a case could be made for "Stranger in a Strange Land."