Sumana

Over in this MetaFilter thread I've been going on and on about:

the books use the medium of prose well, including unreliable narration; how can the TV series adapt that? can it?

the bookending of the two big rescues at the start and end of All Systems Red, and how Wells describes people helping each other overcome their automatic patterns

etc.

I welcome your thoughts! I have spent like 3 hours this week talking about this stuff and would happily talk 3 more.

Spoilers for both Novik's Temeraire series and Kowal's Glamourist series.

( Spoilers for both Novik's Temeraire series and Kowal's Glamourist series )

Someone on Dreamwidth -- I don't remember who -- mentioned and recommended this Star Trek branded novel: Una McCormack's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Never-Ending Sacrifice. I just finished it.

If you loved DS9 then you should strongly consider reading this. Especially if you found the Cardassian-Bajoran dynamic one of the best multi-world arcs of all of Trek.

This book:

• is like if Alan Furst wrote a book about people caught up in the shocks and tumult of the Cardassian empire over the course of DS9, and after
• is the most wrenching Star Trek branded book I've ever read (ok, maybe I've only read 20 or 30 or so)
• touches on Cardassian education, agriculture, visual arts, family life, funeral rituals, and more (as well as literature, as alluded to by the title)
• captures Dukat's voice so well that I felt like I could hear Marc Alaimo declaiming as he walked into the room
• for like 96% of its length is told from the point of view of people who are not Starfleet -- mostly Cardassians, but also a non-Starfleet starship captain
• builds on the worldbuilding in Andrew J. Robinson's Garak-POV novel A Stitch In Time

If you recommended this or saw who did (in a DW post within the last 2 months, I think), please say so in the comments so I can thank you/them?

Reading this also helped me appreciate how the Cardassian empire is probably the villain polity in Trek that makes the most sense to me. It acts like an empire -- it captures and extracts resources from subject worlds because it has stripped its own resources bare. It doesn't just go out and make war because of some inborn biological urge or because warriors have high status.

TANGENT ABOUT A PROBABLY HALF-CENTURY-OLD TREK NITPICK: The one big snag in this whole thing, of course, is replicators. Why is anyone going hungry or thirsty on Cardassia Prime, ever, if replicators exist?! Why does anyone have to farm??!! As far as I am aware this has never been adequately explained in canon (although there are a lot of episodes of the original series, Voyager, and The Animated Series that I have not watched). You can kind of handwave it by talking about the bootstrapping problem of manufacturing replicators, or saying that some things are not replicable with replicators, or by saying that replicators are actually really tetchy and high-maintenance and break a lot in hard conditions, or by coming up with some math about producing and distributing the joules of energy needed to power replicators and saying that's an infrastructure problem that's hard and slow to address.

[This is of course also related to the question Leonard asked on his blog decades ago and that I partially answered in one of the first emails I ever sent him (back before we'd even met, much less dated and married) -- what's the deal with the Ferengi being so scarcity-y in a universe where gold-pressed latinum and all the other stuff can be replicated? (A branded novel says: if you try to replicated gold-pressed latinum you just end up with regular latinum.) At least Mariner points this out in a recent Lower Decks episode!]

I usually don't get wrought up about this but the thirst and hunger and agronomy in the McCormack book really brings it to the forefront of my mind. We do get some hints that replicators are harder for an untrained person to fix than, say, power generators.

END OF TANGENT

Thinking about realistic and unrealistic Trek empires also made me realize that the Romulan-Vulcan split along logical vs. passionate lines reads to me as something out of fantasy, not scifi.

If you read and enjoyed this or another McCormack book please say so in the comments!

Haven't had a haircut in long enough that I actually comb my hair daily and hold my bangs back with a hairpin. (Old icon is currently appropriate.)

Am reading the harrowing memoir Year of the Nurse by Cassie Alexander.

Just finished Ben Rosenbaum's The Unraveling which was a little disappointing; I think it might feel brain-breaking to readers who haven't read any of the Terra Ignota or the 2nd and 3rd Imperial Radch books, but I wanted the constant idea-flourishing that I get from Rosenbaum's nonfiction speaking and writing, and instead, for about the second half or last third of the book, I knew where things were going and it felt like a kind of familiar story. But it's an interesting read and feels like it's going to be a 2021 must-read for people who want book-length speculative fiction that plays with gender.

I'm re-acclimating to my daily life after a couple of months unavailable/taking care of a responsibility that took me away from my daily life. My regular co-working and co-exercising videocalls help. So do walking around outside and seeing friends outside. I saw a couple of friends recently who didn't know that in NYC they can get free high-quality COVID testing from the city government. Glad I could tell them!

Today Leonard and I played a game where I read aloud nearly all of a New York Times headline and he tried to guess the last word. This feels like a game you could play with kids to help them learn a component of media literacy.

Am trying to co-exercise more -- this entry explains what I'm doing. My schedule has a lot more flexibility as I rebuild it so if you're interested in joining me, speak up in the comments?

My spouse, Leonard Richardson, wrote a military scifi satire novel, and it comes out on December 14th. Situation Normal is available for preorder now. You can also enter the giveaway for a free copy.

Kobo and Indigo have a free preview up, so you can see the content notes and start to meet Becky, Hiroko, Myrus, Churryhoof, Dwap-Jac-Dac, Arun, and the Chief. A few short quotes from the first few chapters:

“Your name,” she said. “Ma’am?” A bit of exaggerated politeness, from someone raised on Fist propaganda about humans and their intensely honor-based culture.

....
“Are you gonna kill me?” said Becky.

“Oh,” said Arun, grimacing, as though Becky had farted, or mentioned money.
....
Becky gulped down another slosh of water. She needed something stronger. Trellis had trained her to face down death. Not very effectively, but at least she’d had the training. Nobody trained you how to face unemployment.

This is a darkly funny book by someone who loves Star Trek, the Coen Brothers' films, and Catch-22. I love this book and want to keep quoting it at you. Here's another quote and links to some reviews.

A few things I particularly think are of note for my Dreamwidth readers:

• This story is told from a bunch of different perspectives, human and alien
  
• Some of the characters are queer women who have sex
  
• Leonard worked with multiple sensitivity readers since he was (for instance) writing Black and queer characters, and made changes at their suggestion
  
• There is violence, but no sexual violence, in the book
  
• There are like 3 jokes and references that I get but that people with no experience of Indian culture will not get, and I treasure them
  
• Multiple characters in this book are, themselves, scifi fans, and this affects the story
  
• If you have grumbled while reading/watching military scifi in the past -- Star Trek, Ender's Game, what have you -- I think you'll enjoy some of the skewerings in this book
  
• The publisher, Candlemark & Gleam, is very indie

I am looking forward to more people reading and enjoying this so I can talk about it with you!

Listening: Listened to the Film Reroll three-parter on Jurassic Park. Listened (and am listening now) to my friend's freeform local radio show. Had never heard of Pynch before, and had never listened to anything off the Beatles' Revolver ("Tomorrow Never Knows" - what a weird song!).

Watching: Leonard and I finished Avatar: The Last Airbender. What a fun show! Engaging, though uneven. I could really see how its level of seriousness paved the way for other stuff I've enjoyed, like Steven Universe. One thing I like in entertainment is when I can't predict precisely what will happen next, perhaps because the characters move faster than I'd assumed or bypass obvious prevarications. I saw this several times, as when one character explicitly says "This is the part where I double-cross you." And -- sometimes with just a few words -- the show gives real personality to characters, not just secondary or tertiary characters, but characters who only show up in a single scene in a single episode.

Leonard and I have just started rewatching Legend of Korra to get the additional layer of resonances (this is amazingly rare -- Leonard is extremely unlikely to rewatch or reread things).

And it's useful for me to have a thing to watch that Leonard doesn't particularly want to, so I can look at moving pictures without feeling like I'm leaving him out, so I am in bits and bobs watching the 1993 Tales of the City series which I don't know whether I ever watched entire. There's something like a fourth series out now, including a tense scene about generational conflict that I saw via social media several months ago. But I don't know whether I'll get all the way there ... I like seeing San Francisco, which I miss, but I'll have to see whether I like the soapiness and the Issue plots.

Playing: I heard good things about Spiritfarer, and we picked it up, but GOSH there's a lot of crafting and dependency management and stuff in the first hour+ rather than the bit where you counsel dying people and help them get to the gate. Leonard explained that this is basically a tutorial stage. I imagine we'll play it some more and see what happens when this tutorial stuff is over. My feelings here are kind of like how I prefer "Once Upon A Time" and "Snake Oil" to board/card games with a bunch of points and numbers mechanics. More making stories up with my friends, less secretarial/project management work.

Reading: some comfort rereading (many bits of China Mountain Zhang, all of Ancillary Justice, some of The Dispossessed), a bunch of short fiction from past and current sf/f magazines (see my Pinboard tags for recommendations, plus recent MetaFilter posts), and I've started Philip K. Dick's Gather Yourselves Together which is a little unpleasant so far because one of the three main characters is a somewhat unpleasant dude.

I realized that I have NOT completed all of Zen Cho's fiction, because she has a short story ("Hikayat Sri Bujang, or, The Tale of the Naga Sage") in The Book of Dragons which came out last month. Waiting now for the ebook to become available from my local library, because $17 for an ebook or $30+ for a paper book when I am only keen on a few of the authors featured is more than I want to spend right now. Although I may change my mind if I'm like "but I want it nooooooow".

I've now finished The Baby-Sitters Club 10-episode first season.

As I was talking with a friend about it -- she, like me, read way more BSC than Sweet Valley while growing up -- I ended up declaiming:

Sweet Valley is about identity (this tight, exclusive unit of two twins) and Babysitters Club is about labor and an ever-expanding coalition (not to mention a worker-owned co-op) that expands across race, age, and gender. SV is to BSC as Star Wars is to Star Trek.

Watching: Enjoyed the National Theatre's Midsummer Night's Dream and started a FanFare thread about it.

Leonard and I are now partway through Season 3 of Schitt's Creek. Some thoughts so far:

* I am always surprised by the moment an episode ends and the credits start to roll. It always feels like "oh I guess that 2 out of three of the plots will not be resolved fully". A different rhythm or comedic expectation or something.
* I find it easier to relate to and sympathize with David and Jonny than Alexis and Moira, and I'm reflecting on to what extent that's about the plots and the characters and the actors, and to what extent (if any) that's internalized sexism. Of course I can more easily relate to a goth art nerd and an entrepreneur than to an actress and a carefree socialite. But still.
* There's a moment where Jonny is drunk and walks into a room and in that moment Leonard and I could see how much Eugene Levy does, or can do, an EXCELLENT Peter Falk impression.
* Because Leonard and I saw a season of The Great Canadian Baking Show (in which Daniel Levy co-hosts) before we saw Schitt's Creek, every once in a while we pause and give David a baking-related line.

And I watched an excellent Darius Kazemi talk called "How I Won the Lottery" -- it's in two parts, so if you watch it, note that the first part is not representative of the second.

Listening: The latest "Jedi Mind Tricks" was neat -- I love how Mike puts together a set of stuff that I usually had never heard of that tickles my ears nicely. I got a Laurie Anderson vibe from the Woodkid piece.

Roadhouse 797, "pragmatic optimisim; like things will be okay, even if the reality right now is a little tough", and Roadhouse 798, with Chicago blues.

Playing: You guessed it: Animal Crossing. We are now well-off-enough in Bells that we don't, for instance, pick all our exotic fruit every day to sell, and are adding more stairways and bridges to make it more comfortable to navigate the whole island without needing a ladder or vaulting pole. I hear there's a software update coming that I'm going to like but I have avoided spoilers.

Reading: I finished Servant to the Crown (followup to last week's midweek entry) and will not be reading the rest. A substantial part of the appeal of these books is meant to be that they have realistic fight scenes, and maybe they do. But I need the POV characters in a fighty book to also be fairly wise about whether to get into a fight. Our super-grizzled veteran Gerald is supposedly a solid fighter and sergeant, who knows from experience how things can go down in the city's poorer neighborhoods. So when his young charge, a noblewoman, wants to see the city slums for the first time, he could easily foresee that this might lead to trouble, and he doesn't do any of the preventive things that he ought to. It's like in my review of the technothriller Hackster -- it breaks my suspension of disbelief if I can easily see that a character who is supposed to be an expert is having a hard time with something I know is relatively easy.

I still don't know what caused past Sumana to want to look into those books. Maybe a social media post somewhere.

Zen Cho's The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water! A treat! Like so much of Cho's work -- funny, sweet, fast-moving, characters making realistic decisions and being real with each other. I am cis and I am curious what nonbinary and trans reviewers think of the book, because of the treatment of a trans character -- seemed fine to me but I'd defer to them. And I feel embarrassed to say this, but in this book I felt, more than usual with Cho's work, that I was missing stuff because I'm not Malaysian, both context and "wait does that word mean what I think?"... stuff that it's hard to look up. I feel embarrassed to say this because, like, that's not a problem with the book, Cho should write for her audience and I still had a good time and liked the story and the characters. There's a level of meaning here I can't access and that makes me sad, is all. Like, I did not know, until Cho mentioned it in publicity materials about the book, ANYTHING about the Malayan Emergency, so I'm glad I at least read that Wikipedia page before I started the book, but there's some stuff I know I'm not getting.

Also, more than in, say, Terracotta Bride (her speculative novelette), at the end of the book I really felt a "what happens next?"! urge. Maybe I just feel this way about novellas/novelettes that end in a particular way. The first time I read my husband's piece "Mallory" (about 11,000 words), I came to the ending and I called Leonard and was quite angry with him before I calmed down and said, it's a good story and I like it.

Because of a recommendation by an acquaintance I read The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary. It is a sweet romance of the "no sex on the page" variety. Fun timepass. Content note that one of the point of view characters is dealing with the aftereffects of an abusive ex-boyfriend.

Watching: Small Island as I mentioned on my other blog. It's available to watch for about 22 more hours -- I recommend it.

Via vidding: a bunch of the VidUKon premieres. The Temeraire fan trailer and "Raising Hell" (on The Good Place particularly spoke to me.

Leonard and I at some point in the last few weeks tried out Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts for a couple episodes and I just did not care for it. It's for children! I'm an adult and sometimes I like things for grown-ups. And I didn't like the main character, and I can't remember what all else I didn't care for.

Then in the past week we started Schitt's Creek and we're about 8 or 9 episodes in now. It took 2 or 3 episodes for me to really start liking the characters and trusting the situations. I came in assuming it would feel a lot like Arrested Development but it's much sweeter.

Listening: My friend's freeform radio show, "Jedi Mind Tricks" -- I really liked his Father's Day show. And my spouse's old colleague's blues podcast, "The Roadhouse", and the dancey? droney? "International Geophysical Year" by mykescipark.

And there's a new animated music video for Rush's "The Spirit of Radio" and it's lovely!

Playing: Animal Crossing. A friend gave us an asteroid! It floats a bit above the ground and gently rotates. Also we now have a golden slingshot, which will come in handy!

Reading: A bunch of Star Trek fanfic over the weekend, such as the mid-1990s DS9 series "Jeu-Parti" by Macedon (am still in the midst of this) and the reboot-movieverse series "Keshta'shivau" by Beatrice_Otter (see my Archive of Our Own bookmarks). I recommend "Keshta'shivau" to your particular attention if you like Vulcans and people straightforwardly negotiating their relationship needs, and people fighting harmful institutions to protect people they love.

I finished KJ Charles's "Sins of the Cities" trilogy, starting with An Unseen Attraction. I hadn't seen this structure before, where one major mystery trails through three different romance stories, each of which has their own romantic pair of heroes. It's neat! I loved many of the characters and their conversations, and I appreciated how each romantic pair had one person doing a job that was kinda unacceptable in polite society even though it gave many people harmless pleasure (which, I presume, also reflects some things KJ Charles might feel about writing romance).

I read Rose Lerner's A Lily Among Thorns and liked some things and disliked others. (I think if I'm going to keep reading historical romances set in England in the early 1800s I am going to have to learn a bit about Napoleon.) I didn't come into it set up with the expectation that there would be two romance plotlines, with a total of four viewpoint characters, and I sort of frequently felt a bit disoriented as I tried to remember what this person wanted, what secrets they were keeping, etc. But I liked most of the characters and I liked the interior and spoken monologues one of them gave on chemistry and fashion. So far my favorite Rose Lerner romance is Listen to the Moon which has an absorbing B-plot about a new manager coming into a house and overhauling its management.

And: at some point many months back, I saw something that made me want to try Paul J Bennett's Servant of the Crown (the first in his "Heir to the Crown" series). I no longer remember what that was, and I'm curious, because I'm halfway through Servant of the Crown and it's a not-super-polished medieval fantasy story about a warrior in a kingdom. The plot clips along pretty fast, and I like the main characters all right, but the sentence-level writing is infelicitous and there is nothing particularly intriguing about the setting or premise. Why did past Sumana think "maybe I will like this"? Maybe tax policy comes up at some point.

I also read and enjoyed the first chapter of Zen Cho's new book The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and am gonna read the book soon (a paper copy).

There's work reading too, like this Python Enhancement Proposal about the governance of the developers of packaging tools, but I'm gonna leave that out here.

Some things I've been watching, reading, etc. Like half this entry is me talking about Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer so be warned.

Listening: Podcasts and playlist I mentioned last time and in late May.

Playing: Still just Animal Crossing.

Watching: Leonard and I started watching the National Theatre's Coriolanus (I had not read or watched it before, but I had attended the recording of a podcast about it) but didn't finish it... seemed really well-done but I didn't want the gory depressing stuff, I think, plus I think I wanted to read a lot instead of looking at a screen as much in the evenings. We've watched a bit more Repair Shop while eating dinner.

Reading: this past weekend I read the latest draft of my spouse's forthcoming military scifi satire, Situation Normal, which is forthcoming from Candlemark & Gleam in December. This is in the same universe as "Four Kinds of Cargo" and has some of the same characters, the crew of the smuggling spaceship Sour Candy.

It was so so good. I hadn't read a draft in at least a year, and this is the best draft so far. I understand better than ever now how one of his inspirations is Catch-22; on this read I also saw hints of Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep and Deepness In The Sky, and saw more clearly the subplot where he's talking back to Ender's Game. I also see more clearly his themes about what stories we tell ourselves and each other to understand ourselves, to rationalize our behavior, to cover our asses, to inspire us. And that's not even getting into the representation of queer people, and black and South Asian people and culture, and and how witty and funny it is, and the neat aliens and the identity and gender stuff. I'm so happy and proud of him, and I hope it gets into the hands of people who will appreciate it!

In the interests of comfort reading, I have also now reread Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer, rereading for the first time since like 2000 or so. Quite a trip, and overall still engaging and fun. There are a few "oh I hope a major author, and their editor, would not let that fly" sexist moments/relationships, and there's one place the "this book sews together 3-4 short stories that were previously published separately" seam really shows, near the end. But overall, what an interesting book.

Like The Babysitters Club and Battlestar Galactica, this is a story about labor. I realized just as I started rereading this week: like (the last bit of) Malcolm X's autobiography and (the second half of) Lee Iacocca's autobiography, Crystal Singer is the story of someone who got kicked out and rejected from the ambition they'd poured all of themselves into, and making their own path into the next thing. I read all those when I was a kid and I think they helped me know that if I got the "what are you gonna do when you grow up?" question wrong, I could choose something else. Also, rereading now, I see Crystal Singer's fantasy of an objective assessment process to see whether you'll be able to do a job, and a well-structured apprenticeship that trains us in all the skills we'll need -- run by a Guild that we (the workers) own and operate, and that takes care of providing housing, healthcare, cooked food, work equipment, and more. For so many of us who work in the typey-typey fields, that's such a fantasy!

( spoiler, I think ) the next time I go to Mountain View or Palo Alto I will have another metaphor to use as a lens.

Reading the book caused me to think about mining as a casual metaphor that we use a lot when thinking about creation and invention. Like, sometimes I come up with a joke and it feels like I discovered it and it was just laying there waiting for someone to pick it up and yet I hadn't heard it yet. ( COVID-19 one-liner ) And we talk about a vein (or a well) of creativity to mine, or of an idea as a gem. But that way of thinking is susceptible to -- and of course I am that free culture and open source software person who thinks this way -- treating ideas as property to be claimed, and running off claim jumpers. And in fact the annals of literature and industry are littered with examples of people who had brilliant ideas but did not execute them well, and with ghost works.

(This reminds me that recently I came across the Honor List from the 1998 Tiptree (now Otherwise) Award jury and enjoyed Candas Jane Dorsey's mention of Dragon's Winter (which I haven't read) by Elizabeth A. Lynn: "I enjoyed reading the book but felt that in the years since Lynn was out on the frontier with the phenomenal authorial courage represented by her trilogy and The Sardonyx Net, others have followed her into that territory and built settlements around her, so that now she sits firmly in the centre of a certain kind of intelligent, emotional, beautifully-written fantasy." What a loving way to discuss genre niches using the metaphor of land.)

There's so much of Crystal Singer I absorbed and loved as a teen without (I think) explicitly noticing it, even besides the giant wish-fulfillment labor and ambition parts. ( spoiler, kind of ) As a "uggh when do I get to leave this house!?" teen I probably loved this.

OK, one last thing -- the way that practically every character you are supposed to like drinks Yarran beer all the time (never even any other variety of beer!) reminds me of one of my spouse's gripes from when he first saw Armageddon -- that practically every book-smart character attended MIT. "MIT is a fine school, but there are others." (Leonard's review upon a rewatch in 2016 is worth reading even if you, like me, never saw the film.)

In the past week I also read The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, and did not care for it. I saw recommendations where people talked about it as though it was fun, and indeed there are a few moving or joyous moments (in particular, a gay love story). But in this 400-page book, for the first 70 pages, our main character is being treated to relentless abuse from his supervisors, colleagues, and neighbor. I do not find that fun! At some point I don't think "this poor guy"; I think "this author is loading on the suffering to make me sympathize with this comprehensively dumped-on protagonist" and I wish I were reading a short story in Strange Horizons where the author took, like, 150 words to make this point. That cast a pall over the rest of the novel, for me. As a whole the book felt obvious, at the level of characterization and moral complexity of a picture book.

Now reading: Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert, a witty murder mystery recommended by singlecrow. Fun so far! Published in 1950 and takes place in a London law firm, so there are definitely references I'm missing (and I'm sure I am not noticing some of the references I am missing) but completely enjoyable regardless.

And I've reread further in Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho -- "The Mystery of the Suet Swain", oooooof, up there with "Women Making Bees in Public" (and a few other stories in Alexandra Erin's short fiction collection First Dates, Last Calls) in depicting the creepy horror of harassment, and how it tricks everyone into thinking it's acceptable.

In a 2015 interview, Cho responded to the question "Can you talk about the relationship of research and/or academic life to your work?":

My reason for featuring academic settings was mostly laziness! I drew on stuff from my life because it minimised research. “One-Day Travelcard” is set in a UK school attended by Malaysian students because I attended a school of that kind. “The Mystery of the Suet Swain” is set in Cambridge because I went to Cambridge, and “First National Forum” was inspired by my brief stint with a Malaysian NGO.

But I also chose those settings because I’ve always loved stories that examine the dynamics within small communities with their own rules and conventions — Jane Austen’s two inches of ivory, Enid Blyton’s school stories, L. M. Montgomery’s Canadian villages, Star Trek’s starships. Schools and universities are a great canvas for fiction, because they’re a bubble that feels like the entire world when you’re in it. Everything can be very high-stakes and intense, while still being small-scale and human.

I particularly love the bomb she drops nonchalantly, adding "Star Trek's starships" as the last one in the list of examples, observing how limited and domestic that bubble can get. Ooof.

Finally: A general reading note! In case anyone here is interested in reading short fiction for free online, you might like to check out my Pinboard bookmarks of short fiction recommendations.