I Am Completely Serious

The people of the icy planet Brakrath depend on the barohnas, a race of powerful psychics/witches/somethings, to bring the summer by melting the snow with their sunstones. Barohnas are long-lived and produce many daughters, one at a time; each one, when she is old enough, goes into the mountain with a spear and finds a beast to kill. If she kills her beast and survives, she will go through a physical transformation to become a barohna herself, depriving her mother of her power and taking it on for herself.

Most of a barohna's daughters die. Khira is the last daughter of the bahrona Tiahna, and is convinced that she will fail just like all of her sisters. Left alone in her mother's hall alone after her last sister's death, she finds a beautiful amnesiac boy abandoned in the cold by the crew of some spaceship. Feeling isolated and resentful of her own people, she decides that he'll keep her company for the winter; she names him Darkchild and alternately pampers him and harasses him. But Darkchild is controlled by a manipulative internal presence called a guide, and he becomes aware long before she does that he poses a threat to her.

Khira is very prickly, proud, and humorless; she thinks she has nothing in common with her mother, but the main difference I see between them is that Tiahna has mastered sarcasm. I assume it's like those abilities Pokemon can only learn after they've evolved to their final form. Khira's a refreshingly mean heroine.

Darkchild, on the other hand, is supernaturally pure; he actually makes friends with a unicorn at one point. (Well, you know, a space unicorn.) His guide, fretful and anal-retentive, is a more interesting character. Their dynamic makes more sense as it becomes clear that ( cut for minor spoilers ) This probably isn't the first ever instance of this plot device, but I think it's the earliest I've seen - the book came out in 1983.

The writing tends towards the purple, but never in a way that made me laugh at it; Brakrath's mythology feels sturdy even where it's not fully explained. van Scyoc clearly knew the rest of the story. Another place where the book is good is its generally unsentimental portrayal of Khira - she's frequently cruel or thoughtless, but still clearly admirable. The book forms a tidy emotional arc in itself, but some plot elements are left hanging. It's the first in a three-book series, and I clearly need to get the others. Apparently the second part of a barohna's life cycle involves soul-bonded lesbian lovers from whom they draw their power.

This is not an original observation, but: In terms of worldview, at least, Rex Stout was a way nicer person than Agatha Christie. Archie and Wolfe were both kind of jerks sometimes, and Archie racist, but the sorts of stories he told make it clear that Stout himself was aware that women and black people were, you know, people. (I don't know about other ethnicities; I think there was a Hispanic guy who was skeevy once? Otherwise, non-existent.)

Christie, I don't know! She was pretty okay with women who were, like, virgins. Or old and meddling. The others seem to have presented some kind of problem. I think she thought people who weren't white and English were probably off eating babies and carrying on about something, and should be left to that, elsewhere.

If mysteries are fantasies of justice - I think that that is generally a fair statement - then there's still a lot of room for variation when you get down to the author's idea of what justice is. The Wolfe books are rarely particularly interested in punishment for their villains; that stuff gets, like, one paragraph at the end, if that much. (The major exception I've run into so far being the Arnold Zeck arc, which is about revenge, and feels extremely unlike the rest of the series.) There's the scene where everyone lines up in Wolfe's office and Wolfe verbally takes the villain apart, and then it's on to presents. Because what the books are really interested in is comfort for the victims. Large piles of money, the removal of romantic barriers, the awarding of desired careers and living situations, and emotional validation from authority figures - mainly Wolfe himself, Cramer, and various rich old white businessmen.

(Not really any politicians or lawyers getting to act as the authority figure, I think? Stout kinda treated successful entrepreneur guys with ethics the way some fantasy writers treat Good Kings/Queens - as possessing great moral authority and great potential for being betrayed. - I unfortunately think the female equivalent here is generally the entrepreneur's wife, and I can only think of one instance of that one off-hand. There was a brilliant Machiavellian executive assistant once, who basically pushed every single one of my narrative buttons; but she ended up getting murdered and having to metaphorically come back and haunt everyone to achieve her goals.)

Anyway, I find these books pleasant to read because this aligns closely with my own personal sense of justice. Maybe I would feel differently if anyone had ever messed with me in a really serious way, but while I see the appeal of punishment, I don't see that I have the right to insist upon it. Honestly, I hope someone would stop me from doing so if I were far enough gone to change my mind about that; I don't want to wake up some day with the knowledge that someone's dead because I pushed for the death penalty for them.

Remedy for past harm and prevention of future harm are the goals; if the remedy (say, money) and the prevention (say, jail time, or a large enough sum of money to make anyone else think twice about whatever it was) cause pain to the person who caused the harm in the first case, then as long as that pain is not disproportionate to the harm, then that's fine. But pain for its own sake is revenge rather than justice. It doesn't strike me as a good goal.

(This from someone who's read nearly everything that Anne McCaffrey, master of Inhumane Wish Fulfillment, wrote before 2000. I'm confused myself. Maybe I just overdosed?)

Unrelatedly, I've been back at work two days and am already exhausted. Two days because I had to skip yesterday due to an extremely stupid decision to try to climb a set of stairs up the hill at the park in one go. As of today, upon application of muscle relaxants and heating pads, I can again stand up and sit down without undue difficulty. I even climbed a small set of four stairs today, though I did it sideways and leaning on the banister after the first time. There was a period last fall when I was climbing that hill almost every day. Apparently sitting around doing nothing for three weeks has consequences on your muscles!

The Kindly Ones, by Melissa Scott

On the planets of Orestes and Electra, certain social crimes are punishable by "death" - the criminals are declared ghosts, and the "living" cannot speak to them or even acknowledge their existence. Only specially-licensed mediums can speak to both the living and the dead.

Trey Maturin is a medium from off-planet, a former actor occasionally undone by a penchant for the dramatic, working for the most powerful family on Orestes - who hate actors. Trey is simultaneously drawn to the beauty of Orestes' theatre and disgusted by the brutality of its customs. The "disgusted by" side gets kind of a boost when the family in question goes to war with two others over a pointless duel fought by two spoiled twenty-somethings. When things go too far, Trey is forced to pick up the pieces with the help of two space pilots - Leith, a former soldier from off-world, and Guil, an Oresteian woman who has declared herself "para'anin," or neutral and without family - and Rehur, former heir to Trey's employer, who chose to become a ghost to dedicate his life to acting.

This is an interesting concept and cast of characters trapped in a bog of unnecessary exposition. It's not a long book, but probably thirty to forty percent of the text consists of explanations of one aspect or another of Oresteian society or of piloting spaceships. This wouldn't be such a terrible thing if most of these details weren't irrelevant to the story. In the first chapter, Leith asks a number of questions about Guil's past. By the end of the book, none of them have been answered - but we are extremely well-informed about the Oresteian equivalent of dogsled racing. (They use alien polar bears in heat, and sometimes people die.)

Scott's book Shadow Man, about a society with five genders trying desperately to pretend there are only two, is very explicitly about sexuality and its social construction. Her strategy with The Kindly Ones is the opposite. If you weren't alert to the possibility, you could easily miss the fact that Leith and Guil are lovers until the last chapter. You could make it through the whole book without realizing that Trey - I'm hiding this, though it's a spoiler-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder - is never explicitly identified as male or female. In fact, this reviewer did so!

It's interesting that she was able to do that so smoothly, and I appreciate that this book came out in '87, when standards were different. But since it doesn't serve much narrative purpose, I'd have preferred that Scott be less coy about this stuff.

Fair Play, by Tove Jansson

Conversation with thegeekgene, from whom I kind of stole the book:

thegeekgene: I just read this book by Tove Jansson.

Me: Is it about being moody lesbians by the sea?

thegeekgene: They're on an island.

This book is about how art is tortuous and sometimes it's an exercise in futility and it drives the people around you crazy. And how relationships are basically the same. Also, islands, old age, and boats. It's pretty funny. It's partially autobiographical - Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä did, indeed, create a little artists' colony for themselves on an island.

Jansson is best known for the Moomins books, a series of children's books about a little hippo-looking creature called Moomintroll. The books are astonishingly sweet and poignant, focused on the changing of the seasons, loss, disaster, and the all-powerful nature of mothers. The funny thing about this book is that it's so much like the Moomins books. You kind of get the feeling that they were also somehow autobiographical.

Though the book feels light for the most part, there are dark depths to it. But interestingly, it doesn't feel anywhere near as heavy as the two last Moomins books chronologically, Moominpapa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. The former of these was about death and despair, and the latter was a self-critical examination of Jansson's relationship with her fans, her characters, and her mother. MiN is possibly the most metatextual narrative I've ever encountered. Jansson'd had twenty-five years of writing about Moomins to build up a cosmology, and she clearly felt the weight of it on her, and chose to make use of it as she ended the series. Fair Play, written another twenty years later, long after Jansson had shed the burden of all that context, is gentler and less disturbing.

I'm halfway through Jaran and maybe thirty pages into Cold Magic right now*, and I think I've pinned down why Elliott's Crown of Stars manages to be so wrenching. It's because Elliott's base narrative, the one that comes to her organically, is one in which people respect each other, enemies treat each other fairly, most people are pretty okay, and pretty okay is probably good enough to keep the world sane. There are situations in Jaran which, in almost any other book, would be a source of constant tension between the protagonists, but Elliott sails past them or cuts them out, because the story she wants to tell there is about people who can get along and apologize when they hurt each other's feelings.

A lot of the conflicts in Crown of Stars are very basic fantasy-novel things - unsuitable heir to the throne, star-crossed romance, evil wizard enslaves a girl. There are writers who deal with this stuff very neatly, like laying cookies in a pan. For Elliott, though, it's viscerally wrong - people who love each other are hurting each other! They're acting stupid! I think she doesn't like it, and that comes through. It's unusually humane.


* Reading five books at a time is healthy. It means I'm... flexible.

Someone sent me this text earlier in the year. I guess I can just be assumed to know such things.

My answer was as follows. (By email.)

In response to to your text, I regret to inform you that the only perfect match to your request I can think of is Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey.

Other possible matches below. Stuff that I recommend has an asterisk.

(It's sad that I can compile a list like this so quickly.)

( No Lesbians )

( Contains Lesbians )

( Manga )

I was later told that this request had been made on behalf of a friend who was really into Nalini Singh. So I am, like, the go-to person for when you've got a bored Nalini Singh fan on your hands. I fear for my future.

Spoilers for all four books under the cuts.

1) Though each of these books, taken individually, is hopeful in tone, taken together they're extremely ominous.

( Cut for spoilers. )

I can't see how this series can possibly keep maintaining the tone it has for much longer without damaging its plausibility. This world is just too screwed.

2) Another alarming pattern: ( spoilers )

3) Regarding the wizards: ( They actually kind of suck. )

4) My prediction regarding Slado: ( HE'S CLOW REED )

1. Bujold does not know how Japanese names and honorifics work. This is very jarring, because I do know.

2. I don't think that crisis midway through actually made sense. I feel like all Miles' research would have turned up some photographs at some point.

3. That was an EXTREMELY sudden romance.

4. AGH VERY LAST SENTENCE

and Octavia Butler was completely insane.

I mean, the Xenogenesis series made this fairly clear, but this book contains every questionable decision Xenogenesis made multiplied by a factor of eight.

COMYN LORD: I am so angry and celibate! It has something to do with my psychic powers.

HIS DAD: Cry moar. You are going to be a warrior and awesome and give me millions of awesome grandchildren because I have inadequacy issues.

COMYN LORD: I hate you, father! I fantasize about killing you with such eerie vividness that I must flee the room to rest my burning forehead against the cool stones of the corridor wall, terrified by how near I have come to patricide this day.

HIS DAD: (That is normal on Darkover.)

COMYN LADY: HI I’M HERE FOR THE ARRANGED MARRIAGE

( Read the rest of this entry » )

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