I Am Completely Serious

* Lord of Light is a stupid bullshit whiny-baby-Mary-Sue book that's not even paced competently and should never under any circumstances be referred to as a "classic."

* You can call A Night in the Lonesome October a classic, though. That's fine.

* The Hugo and Nebula awards are invalid on the basis that Salman Rushdie never won either of them.

* It's hilarious for reasons I cannot define that in 1989, the year The Satanic Verses would have been up, the Hugo went to Cyteen, Cherryh's probably-best sci-fi book, and the Nebula to Falling Free, Bujold's probably-worst.

I mean, you're not really going to get me to argue about Cyteen, I will allow that it defeats The Satanic Verses in several categories, including the ones that matter most to me personally. But Falling Free? For real? They can't have been serious. Did Bujold get snubbed for something else and they were going, oh, shit, gotta fix this gotta fix this, quick let's pin a gold star on this hastily-edited first draft!

* The Wikipedia page for the thing that beat Midnight's Children to the Nebula is also pretty funny. I'm sure that all of these ideas seemed very compelling in 1980.

It's this big impenetrable book with a zillion meandering digressions about a woman with a dual nature who's both the hero and the villain. She must rise up to take out the FOOLS who DARE to limit her grand vision.

Except that CotL is apparently more sarcastic about it. Cyteen takes itself super seriously.

The stuff about how the brain-doubles can never meet without causing permanent psychological damage - haha, Cherryh, Rose laughs at your charming naivete. It's so much worse than that. IT MAKES JADE TALK IN ALL-CAPS.

I'm re-reading Watcher's Mask - which I like - and a few years ago I read Delan the Mislaid - which I didn't. And it occurred to me that man, Marks's earlier stuff was way grimmer than the Elemental Logic series. And it's not like Elemental Logic is exactly unicorns and fluffy bunnies and Mercedes Lackey when she's not being edited! It doesn't approach Carol Berg or Susan R. Matthews levels of cruelty, but there are definitely places where it creeps up on Barbara Hambly.

Whereas I think Watcher's Mask actually shoots past Berg. (Matthews still reigns as champion.) Maybe something happened just before Fire Logic? Or maybe I should read Dancing Jack to confirm that the shift didn't happen somewhere in there.

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In an unrelated literary mystery, I've read four-and-a-half of her books now, and at this point I've got to admit that I just don't get C. J. Cherryh. She always seems to have a clear picture of where she wants to go with a book, and I think she gets there - but I rarely have any idea what she found compelling about the locale. It's similar to my reaction to Akihabara.

The half-a-book is Regenesis, which I'm reading now. If it were any other writer, I'd be beginning to suspect that our protagonists would be safer if they read more fiction and knew how to recognize the villain. Since it's Cherryh, I've got no idea what the hell she's doing. Maybe the whole cast'll turn into bats next chapter. There'll be some obvious thematic reason for it.