Books read, August 2023
Sep. 7th, 2023 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerThe Truth of the Aleke, Moses Ose Utomi.
I actually read this last month, but forgot to note it then.
This was sent to me for blurbing, because I read, loved, and happily blurbed Utomi's previous novella, The Lies of the Ajungo. As the titles imply, this is a connected story -- I guess it's fair to call it a sequel, but Lies was such a beautifully paced and self-contained story, and this isn't attempting to continue on with the same character or anything as simple as that. Its vibe is a bit different, too, less mythic in tone. If you've read the first novella you'll be looking for the irony in the title of this one, and it's there . . . but it's not quite the same irony as before, which is good. My only problem now is figuring out what to say for my blurb, which I swear to god is harder than writing an actual story.
A Thousand Recipes for Revenge, Beth Cato.
Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writers' Group, and have heard her talking for some time about her "foodie musketeer" book.
This is an alternate version of our world, focused on France (here called Verdania), but with one of its protagonists hailing from essentially an independent Normandy. The central concept is that there are supernatural creatures whose body parts, if suitably prepared, have a wide variety of magical effects. Suitable preparation, however, requires Chefs, who get a capital letter because it's an inborn ability, bestowed on human beings by one of the five Gods they worship. Gyst is an interesting deity; he's the God of mysteries -- which also makes him the god of things like fermentation and decay, because those processes are mysterious and caused by things humans can't see. And because I am the sort of nerd who will glom onto religious stuff in books and how it gets integrated into the rest of society, I loved little touches like death being referred to as the moment when all a person's mysteries will be resolved.
But because the work Chefs do is so valuable, they're all supposed to work in the service of the government. One of the protagonists here is a rogue Chef who ran away from that life and has been surviving in the shadows ever since -- along with her grandmother, who may be riddled with dementia but is still a fabulous character I hope will reappear in the sequel. The other is a foreign princess being married into the royal family of Verdania, who finds herself in a rather larger political bind than is usual for protagonist princesses headed into a diplomatic marriage. I can't say much more than that without spoiling the plot, I think, but I will note (for those of you who have read this one) that I really liked the direction the story went in once the Coterie came onstage.
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, Seb Falk.
Not to be confused with The Bright Ages, a different recent medieval history book that aims to rehabilitate the image of the Middle Ages (and which I believe has come under fire in the field for failing to acknowledge the work done by previous scholars, particularly POC scholars).
This one is more narrowly focused than The Bright Ages, in ways that definitely bring it more into line with what I'm accustomed to reading. Its focus is, as the subtitle suggests, on science, but I'd say within that it tends to focus particularly on astronomy. Not just because it plays nicely with the title, I suspect, but because astronomy is a field where we can see things we recognize as "science" going on. Falk makes the point at the outset that we do the period a disservice by insisting on too narrow a definition of that term; medieval people may not have spent much time practicing the scientific method, with its hypotheses and controlled variables and so forth, but they were interested in understanding the world around them -- even when they would have framed the reasons for and assumptions behind their understanding as religious ones. They spent a great deal of time observing the heavens, constructing ever-more elaborate devices to perform astronomical calculations, and wrestling with theories that could address the anomalies that kept sending their calculations awry over time. That's important groundwork for what came after, as is the work they did in other fields, even if it's not experimental science per se.
I enjoyed this one enough that, after reading it in ebook while traveling, I went ahead and bought a paper copy. The ebook isn't bad, but the nature of the medium and the fact that I read on my phone (no tablet) meant that I wasn't able to see the diagrams nearly as well as I wanted to. And the odds that I'll want to understand an astrolabe or an equatorium well enough to write about it in a story at some point seem reasonably high to me, and this book did a lucid enough job of explaining those things that I'd like to have it on my shelf.
The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein.
This book not infrequently crops up alongside the Memoirs of Lady Trent in discussions about novels that are focused on scholarship. When a friend recommended it in passing one afternoon, I decided to finally get off my duff and pick it up. (Brief pause to appreciate the way that modern ebooks and POD make it easier to acquire older titles like this one; it's clearly a reprint edition, made much more recently than the original publication of 1989.)
(Also, man did I want the timing to support my theory that The Steerswoman influenced Robert Jordan, because there are some ways in which the steerswomen really, really remind me of Aes Sedai. Alas, unless Jordan read it in manuscript, that's 100% impossible: Kirstein's book came out less than six months before The Eye of the World.)
Reading this was a bit of a throwback, in terms of what the world feels like and how it's presented to the reader. The book not infrequently felt a touch thin, especially since Kirstein often skips freely over intervening material, some of which I'd normally expect to see played out on the page. But it did grow on me in its central concept, which is that steerswomen -- and the very occasional steersman -- seek to record and understand a world that, you gradually realize, is probably ours or something very much like ours post-apocalypse. As of finishing this first volume, I'm genuinely unsure whether there's anything in it I'd call actual magic: most if not all of the physical effects can be explained by science and technology no longer understood, leaving (perhaps) only one blatant display of what sure seems like mind-magic. But figuring out what's going on under the surface is part of the pleasure here, as I began piecing together the hints strewn through the text.
Rowan, the titular steerswoman, is also an interesting character -- a phrase I use in a slightly different sense than usual. It's less that I find her emotionally compelling -- the aforementioned thinness comes into play there -- and more that she doesn't work like most characters I'm used to seeing on the page. She's overtly analytical, and what's more, her analysis is often laid out for you. There's one striking section where she basically thinks through a situation and says, A or B, C or D, E or F, G or H; H would fail to match the situation, so it must be G; since G, only E makes sense; since E, it must be D; and therefore A. In other words, she logics her way through a significant crux in the plot, in a way I rarely see supposedly "logic-driven" characters actually do. And her willingness to solve problems by being open and cooperative, because that's the steerswomen's ethos, made for a really nice change of pace.
Uncommon Charm, Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver.
A cute little novella set in an alternate fantasy 1920s, which served as a stark reminder of how workmanlike the prose is in a lot of what I read. The sentences here aren't lush or ornate; they just have voice, right from the get-go. You could not substitute a page of this into someone else's book and swap the names out with no one the wiser.
Plot-wise, it was both delightful and odd. It starts off with Julia, the daughter of a famous sorceress mother who's just taken a young Jewish man in to be his protege. The young man, Simon, can see ghosts, while Julia's general attitude toward magic is "I can't do it and that's fine because I'm not especially interested." It's hard to say much about where that plot goes without spoiling anything, but it's not where I expected: mainly the story is interested in having the characters learn some truths, and when that's done, so is the story. No particular confrontations or dramatic changes of status quo, just "and now you know." Which makes it a much quieter story than the voice and premise made me expect, but not in a bad way. I very much loved Julia's mother's approach to magic -- which she at least sees as highly personalized and subjective -- and her conversations with Simon about what his magic means to him, especially within the context of his Jewish faith.
I have no idea whether Bergslien and Weaver intend more with these characters or this world, but I would read it if they do.
The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, Beth Lincoln, ill. Claire Powell.
This was delightful. Sonya Taaffe recommended it with the comparison "Edward Gorey does The Westing Game," and I was basically sold on the spot; I cannot say she was wrong. Everyone in the Swift family is named with a random selection from the Dictionary, and this name is believed to be the kid's destiny: you cannot help your name. Shenanigan Swift certainly lives up to hers, both before and after somebody pushes Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude down the stairs during a rare family reunion, but she also bucks the trend in some key ways, as do other characters. The other members of the Swift family (and a very small number of outsiders) are all highly vivid and rarely naturalistic, but that latter is hardly a problem; if you're here for "Edward Gorey does The Westing Game," then realism is probably not what you're looking for. I often find middle grade novels a little too thin for my taste, but this one works precisely because it's not trying to play the same type of game as most adult books.
Once again, no idea whether Lincoln intends more with this setting or these characters. I would certainly read more, though I'm not sure a direct sequel would work; the note it ends on is the right kind of unresolved, and continuing on might wreck that. Not to mention that Shenanigan's character arc doesn't feel like it needs more after what we've already seen. But different members of the Swift family at different points in time? I would absolutely be there for that. (This seems to be twentieth-century but possibly the first half thereof, since there are neither cell phones nor computers to be seen.)
Quintessence, David Walton.
Alternate Tudor history of a sort that reminds me of Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters: the world genuinely is flat, the sun gets bigger as you get closer to the edge because the celestial mechanics mean you're also getting closer to the sun as it sets, and the principles ideas of alchemy work, though nobody's actually turning lead into gold. This is also an alternate history that does something I'd ordinarily be a bit chary of: there are no Native Americans of any kind on the island that lies at the western edge of the world (an island which is definitely not North or South America). On the one hand, erasure of that kind isn't great; on the other hand, the sentient inhabitants of the island are also 100% operating on magical biology that is not that of human beings, so trying to present them as being more closely analogous to indigenous Americans would feel weird in a different way. For me it felt all right because the entire setup of the world had been rewritten on such a fundamental level, but others' mileage may vary.
Anyway, the story. It starts off with a bang, as a ship returns from the fabled island of Horizon laden with wondrous treasures . . . but the few surviving crew drop dead shortly after arrival, their internal organs are full of sand and salt, and the "treasures" are likewise just rocks, water, and so forth. A new expedition gets mounted to, among other things, confirm the theory that these substances transformed when they got too far away from the abundant quintessence found in Horizon.
The pacing and balance of attention here felt slightly peculiar to me -- not in a deal-breaking way, but certainly an odd one. For one thing, a lot of the scenes are very short -- barely a page, or less than -- and it doesn't skip over the time gaps between events as gracefully as it might. For another, it takes something like a quarter of the book for the expedition to set out, with that quarter being spent on developing the politics at home in England, where Edward VI is about to kick the bucket and Mary is waiting in the wings. On the one hand it sets up why the expedition carries a bunch of Protestant settlers fleeing Mary's persecution, and some later developments around a Spanish ship, but on the other hand it feels like a lot of time spent on what's being left behind, rather than where they're going. In fact, you're more than halfway through the book before they get to Horizon, and the journey definitely felt like it could have been compressed, with the full nuances of how the captain manages (or fails to manage) the challenges during the voyage ultimately not important enough to merit the amount of attention they got. In some ways I think the pacing has to do with the fact that this book has a sequel, Quintessence Sky, but the end of this volume felt like enough of a reasonable ending that I don't quite feel compelled to read onward.
And my mild frustration with the pacing is because in the end, I was here for the stuff in Horizon -- and I enjoyed that part! The colonists figuring out the special abilities of the different organisms they find there and forming their own equivalent to the Royal Society (a bit precociously; the real Royal Society wasn't founded until the next century) to investigate the source and uses of those abilities was honestly great. I could have done with much more exploration of what the colonists dub the "manticores," too. I wanted more of that, less of the other stuff -- and the second book might deliver it, but the blurb left me a bit too "meh" to really want to pick it up. Alas.
Adirondack Almanac: A Guide to the Natural Year, Tom Kalinowski, ill. Sheri Amsel.
Nothing in this book says explicitly that it's mimicking Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, but the title and the material certainly imply it. Kalinowski goes month by month through the year, telling you what interesting things are going on in the natural world of the Adirondacks -- mostly the animal/insect world, much less the plants, though they show up in the context of animal behavior and occasionally as bits of descriptive detail salted in here and there. He can't remain rigidly chronological without distorting the flow of the material; any given section may make reference to what the robins or the blackflies or the shrews were doing a month or two earlier, or what they'll be doing a month or two from now. But he manages to keep a good enough focus on the activity of that month that it doesn't feel scattershot at all.
This kind of book is a godsend for me if I ever need to write an extended bit set in that kind of environment, because of the focus not only on what exists in a given ecosystem, but what it's doing at any given time. Which critters are breeding, which ones have young, who's going into torpor, who's relaxing the defense of their territory or ramping it up because that can change over the course of the year. If anybody happens to know of more like this and Sand County Almanac, please let me know, because I'd love to collect more.
The Long, Long Life of Trees, Fiona Stafford.
British trees! With occasional nods to their cousins in other parts of the world, but Britain is very much the center of attention here. Which is exactly what I wanted, because I have a verrrrry nascent notion for a story that would lean into the folklore of trees in England. Stafford only intermittently talks about the folklore side, but it's present enough to make this useful to me -- especially since she's fairly scrupulous about noting which trees, despite being ubiquitous in England, are actually newer imports. (For the purposes of my story, that will matter.) Sycamores are a recent arrival, for example, and so are the sweet varieties of apple -- well, for values of "recent" that equate to "Roman." There's a decent amount of illustration in here, as she talks about the attention paid to certain trees by artists, though for some trees I could have done with more examples that show the full thing, rather than just detail shots.
I've got another British book on the subject, too, and though I won't be reading it in the immediate future -- there's only so much tree-focused reading I can absorb at a time -- I'll be interested to see how the two compare.
Aboriginal Legends: Animal Tales, A.W. Reed.
A companion book of sorts to one I posted about a few months ago, Aboriginal Tales of Australia. The titles are no real guide to what to expect in each book; many of the stories in that latter are about animals, because -- presuming this is a representative sample of Aboriginal storytelling -- a lot of their stories thoroughly blur the line between "about animals" and "about people," because the animals are generally behaving in extremely people-like ways. (Also, I think one of the stories in here was also in the other book, though I'd have to go searching through to compare.)
But still, I like reading collections of this sort from a broad range of places, and it's even better when I have more than one, even when they're by the same author. I wouldn't call this riveting reading from a modern fiction standpoint -- most actual folklore isn't -- but it's interesting from the perspective of getting a feel for a different environment and a different society living within it. I wish this book had a glossary like the other did, however flawed it may have been; many of the objects/animals/plants mentioned here are unfamiliar to me, and I wasn't able to find all of them online, at least not with a casual search.
The Surviving Sky, Kritika H. Rao.
This book basically had me at the back cover, because it said one of the protagonists is an archaeologist.
Bad news first: Ahilya is not an archaeologist. I have no flipping clue why she's called one, not just in the cover copy but throughout the book; she in no way, shape, or form studies human society through its material culture. She excavates no sites -- in fact, even the cover copy had me wondering how she could, when the central concept here is that the ground is so badly shredded by frequent storms called "earthrages" that nobody can live on it anymore and must resort to flying cities instead. She studies no artifacts -- those wouldn't really survive, either. The closest she comes to archaeology is reading some old histories and theorizing about the distant past. What she she actually does with most of her research time is tag creatures in the jungle with trackers because she wants to figure out how they manage to survive the earthrages, and that, my friends, is what we might call a field biologist.
The good news is, I'm perfectly happy to read about a field biologist! (So long as I metaphorically plug my ears every time her work is called "archaeology.") And this is genuinely an interesting novel otherwise. For one thing, it does a thing even adult SF/F rarely touches on, which is to write about a married couple; rather than the usual familiar arc of "character meets character, attraction blossoms, HEA," we start with a husband and wife who are badly estranged from one another and whose path back to marital harmony is so much two steps forward, one point nine steps back that they've only just kind of sort of arrived by the end of the book. (This is the start of a series, of what length I don't know -- but I should mention that it ends on a reasonably satisfying note. Not a fully resolved one, to be sure, but if you're okay with the sort of ambiguous closure where the characters have to decide what to do with themselves now, it works.)
It is also, especially by the end, kind of balls-to-the-wall with its sheer ideas in a way I've found in relatively few novels lately. In one sense I think it's easy to see where the story is going; any time you pick up a novel where the party line is "here is the way the world must be because our history and our theories tell us XYZ," you can pretty much guess what's going to turn out to be not true. But the way in which it turns out to be not true . . . that's a different matter. I did not anticipate where this book ended up.
Partly that's because frankly, the whole structure of metaphysics around trajection never quite popped into clarity for me. But since that's a complaint I've also seen about the Rook and Rose series, I feel obliged to say that I stand by my feelings when it's my own book getting that response, which is: do you really have to understand it all? Is explaining that the main thing the story is trying to do, or can you let it slide and focus on the characters and the plot instead? I don't have to be able to write you a clear rundown of trajection and the Resonance and the Moment and the Deepness and stars and ragas and architects' sort-of tattoos; I devoured the book without ever arriving at that point. If you're someone who does feel the need for that clarity, this might well be a frustrating read, but I can vouch for the story being enjoyable without that.
The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman.
I didn't expect to have another book to report on from August. Then my flight to DragonCon in Atlanta got delayed for three hours, and I blew through this while trying to keep myself occupied.
It turns out not to be quite the book I expected. The subtitle and my very vague memory of wherever I saw it recommended made me think it was on how radical ideas get developed, but Beckerman's central thesis is actually quite different. He's interested in the incubation period of revolutionary change -- the stretch of time in which those ideas get developed, tested, and modified, before they burst fully onto the stage -- and argues that this period is necessary for successful revolutions, whether political or ideological. Which is important because the secondary thesis of this book is that social media, at least in certain forms, is actually detrimental to that incubation, and leads to revolutions dying before they can really get traction.
As such, the book exists in two informal halves. The chapters in the first half look at seventeenth-century Europe (early scientific revolution), nineteenth-century Britain (Chartism and the pursuit of universal suffrage), early twentieth-century Italy (the Futurists), 1940s West Africa (independence movements), 1960s Soviet Russia (political dissidents), and the 1990s U.S. (riot grrrls) to study the kinds of networks and tactics those groups developed in pursuit of their goals: respectively, letter-writing, mass petitions, manifestos, newspapers, samizdat, and zines. Then there's an interlude titled "Cyberspace," which steps sideways to discuss the WELL, an early internet community, to make the point that nostalgic reminiscences over the birth of the internet often gloss over how active moderation and community management have always been required to keep the place functioning nicely. After that the attention turns to Tahrir Square in 2011 and the Arab Spring more generally, Charlottesville in 2017 and the neo-Nazi movement, the U.S. in 2020 and doctors in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and Minneapolis in 2020 and Black Lives Matter.
The inflection point around the internet matters, though this isn't simplistically "the internet is bad!" or "the internet is solely to blame!" The Riot Grrrls trend and its associated feminism, Beckerman argues, died young because the spotlight shone in it too soon: what started out with teens and women working with glue sticks and photocopiers suddenly became the focus of magazine articles and interviews, which broke the discourse that was happening between people in what had up until then been an informal movement born out of personal pain. After that, though . . . the effect Facebook and Twitter had on the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt, was to push for bold demonstrations that stood on a foundation of emotion and nothing else, because the activists involved in those things had developed no deeper solidarity, no systems for further organization, no strategy for the future. Circumstances bum-rushed them into what looked like success, but the only people remotely prepared for the next steps were the Muslim Brotherhood, and even they wound up getting stomped by the army reasserting power.
Which is not to say there's no way for the internet to be of use. The Charlottesville chapter is particularly chilling, as it shows how the alt-right was able to use the more closed chambers of Discord to do exactly the kind of work Beckerman argues is necessary, workshopping their ideas and messaging and upcoming actions before debuting those things on the public stage -- but Beckerman points out that just because we currently associate that kind of seclusion and secrecy with bad actors doesn't mean it can't also be turned to good ends. That's the message of the final two chapters, where he shows coalitions of doctors using private email groups to discuss what they did and didn't know about COVID-19 and how to present plans to government officials, and Black activists retreating off the generalized outrage machine of public Twitter to plan the kind of ground-up, local action that can potentially produce actual results in specific communities.
I've gone on at greater length than I meant to, but it's because I think there's a lot to chew on here for people who are tired of Facebook- and Twitter-style social media where the goal is to amass followers and likes rather than concrete change. It also reminded me in many ways of Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which shares the general thesis that such services are actively fragmenting our ability to take meaningful action. As the exodus (X-odus?) from the Service Formerly Known as Twitter continues and we disperse across half a dozen competing networks, it's worth thinking about what kind of behavior those networks encourage and discourage, and where we should be spending our time if we want to make a difference with the problems we're currently facing.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/BlXvXb)
I actually read this last month, but forgot to note it then.
This was sent to me for blurbing, because I read, loved, and happily blurbed Utomi's previous novella, The Lies of the Ajungo. As the titles imply, this is a connected story -- I guess it's fair to call it a sequel, but Lies was such a beautifully paced and self-contained story, and this isn't attempting to continue on with the same character or anything as simple as that. Its vibe is a bit different, too, less mythic in tone. If you've read the first novella you'll be looking for the irony in the title of this one, and it's there . . . but it's not quite the same irony as before, which is good. My only problem now is figuring out what to say for my blurb, which I swear to god is harder than writing an actual story.
A Thousand Recipes for Revenge, Beth Cato.
Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writers' Group, and have heard her talking for some time about her "foodie musketeer" book.
This is an alternate version of our world, focused on France (here called Verdania), but with one of its protagonists hailing from essentially an independent Normandy. The central concept is that there are supernatural creatures whose body parts, if suitably prepared, have a wide variety of magical effects. Suitable preparation, however, requires Chefs, who get a capital letter because it's an inborn ability, bestowed on human beings by one of the five Gods they worship. Gyst is an interesting deity; he's the God of mysteries -- which also makes him the god of things like fermentation and decay, because those processes are mysterious and caused by things humans can't see. And because I am the sort of nerd who will glom onto religious stuff in books and how it gets integrated into the rest of society, I loved little touches like death being referred to as the moment when all a person's mysteries will be resolved.
But because the work Chefs do is so valuable, they're all supposed to work in the service of the government. One of the protagonists here is a rogue Chef who ran away from that life and has been surviving in the shadows ever since -- along with her grandmother, who may be riddled with dementia but is still a fabulous character I hope will reappear in the sequel. The other is a foreign princess being married into the royal family of Verdania, who finds herself in a rather larger political bind than is usual for protagonist princesses headed into a diplomatic marriage. I can't say much more than that without spoiling the plot, I think, but I will note (for those of you who have read this one) that I really liked the direction the story went in once the Coterie came onstage.
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, Seb Falk.
Not to be confused with The Bright Ages, a different recent medieval history book that aims to rehabilitate the image of the Middle Ages (and which I believe has come under fire in the field for failing to acknowledge the work done by previous scholars, particularly POC scholars).
This one is more narrowly focused than The Bright Ages, in ways that definitely bring it more into line with what I'm accustomed to reading. Its focus is, as the subtitle suggests, on science, but I'd say within that it tends to focus particularly on astronomy. Not just because it plays nicely with the title, I suspect, but because astronomy is a field where we can see things we recognize as "science" going on. Falk makes the point at the outset that we do the period a disservice by insisting on too narrow a definition of that term; medieval people may not have spent much time practicing the scientific method, with its hypotheses and controlled variables and so forth, but they were interested in understanding the world around them -- even when they would have framed the reasons for and assumptions behind their understanding as religious ones. They spent a great deal of time observing the heavens, constructing ever-more elaborate devices to perform astronomical calculations, and wrestling with theories that could address the anomalies that kept sending their calculations awry over time. That's important groundwork for what came after, as is the work they did in other fields, even if it's not experimental science per se.
I enjoyed this one enough that, after reading it in ebook while traveling, I went ahead and bought a paper copy. The ebook isn't bad, but the nature of the medium and the fact that I read on my phone (no tablet) meant that I wasn't able to see the diagrams nearly as well as I wanted to. And the odds that I'll want to understand an astrolabe or an equatorium well enough to write about it in a story at some point seem reasonably high to me, and this book did a lucid enough job of explaining those things that I'd like to have it on my shelf.
The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein.
This book not infrequently crops up alongside the Memoirs of Lady Trent in discussions about novels that are focused on scholarship. When a friend recommended it in passing one afternoon, I decided to finally get off my duff and pick it up. (Brief pause to appreciate the way that modern ebooks and POD make it easier to acquire older titles like this one; it's clearly a reprint edition, made much more recently than the original publication of 1989.)
(Also, man did I want the timing to support my theory that The Steerswoman influenced Robert Jordan, because there are some ways in which the steerswomen really, really remind me of Aes Sedai. Alas, unless Jordan read it in manuscript, that's 100% impossible: Kirstein's book came out less than six months before The Eye of the World.)
Reading this was a bit of a throwback, in terms of what the world feels like and how it's presented to the reader. The book not infrequently felt a touch thin, especially since Kirstein often skips freely over intervening material, some of which I'd normally expect to see played out on the page. But it did grow on me in its central concept, which is that steerswomen -- and the very occasional steersman -- seek to record and understand a world that, you gradually realize, is probably ours or something very much like ours post-apocalypse. As of finishing this first volume, I'm genuinely unsure whether there's anything in it I'd call actual magic: most if not all of the physical effects can be explained by science and technology no longer understood, leaving (perhaps) only one blatant display of what sure seems like mind-magic. But figuring out what's going on under the surface is part of the pleasure here, as I began piecing together the hints strewn through the text.
Rowan, the titular steerswoman, is also an interesting character -- a phrase I use in a slightly different sense than usual. It's less that I find her emotionally compelling -- the aforementioned thinness comes into play there -- and more that she doesn't work like most characters I'm used to seeing on the page. She's overtly analytical, and what's more, her analysis is often laid out for you. There's one striking section where she basically thinks through a situation and says, A or B, C or D, E or F, G or H; H would fail to match the situation, so it must be G; since G, only E makes sense; since E, it must be D; and therefore A. In other words, she logics her way through a significant crux in the plot, in a way I rarely see supposedly "logic-driven" characters actually do. And her willingness to solve problems by being open and cooperative, because that's the steerswomen's ethos, made for a really nice change of pace.
Uncommon Charm, Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver.
A cute little novella set in an alternate fantasy 1920s, which served as a stark reminder of how workmanlike the prose is in a lot of what I read. The sentences here aren't lush or ornate; they just have voice, right from the get-go. You could not substitute a page of this into someone else's book and swap the names out with no one the wiser.
Plot-wise, it was both delightful and odd. It starts off with Julia, the daughter of a famous sorceress mother who's just taken a young Jewish man in to be his protege. The young man, Simon, can see ghosts, while Julia's general attitude toward magic is "I can't do it and that's fine because I'm not especially interested." It's hard to say much about where that plot goes without spoiling anything, but it's not where I expected: mainly the story is interested in having the characters learn some truths, and when that's done, so is the story. No particular confrontations or dramatic changes of status quo, just "and now you know." Which makes it a much quieter story than the voice and premise made me expect, but not in a bad way. I very much loved Julia's mother's approach to magic -- which she at least sees as highly personalized and subjective -- and her conversations with Simon about what his magic means to him, especially within the context of his Jewish faith.
I have no idea whether Bergslien and Weaver intend more with these characters or this world, but I would read it if they do.
The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, Beth Lincoln, ill. Claire Powell.
This was delightful. Sonya Taaffe recommended it with the comparison "Edward Gorey does The Westing Game," and I was basically sold on the spot; I cannot say she was wrong. Everyone in the Swift family is named with a random selection from the Dictionary, and this name is believed to be the kid's destiny: you cannot help your name. Shenanigan Swift certainly lives up to hers, both before and after somebody pushes Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude down the stairs during a rare family reunion, but she also bucks the trend in some key ways, as do other characters. The other members of the Swift family (and a very small number of outsiders) are all highly vivid and rarely naturalistic, but that latter is hardly a problem; if you're here for "Edward Gorey does The Westing Game," then realism is probably not what you're looking for. I often find middle grade novels a little too thin for my taste, but this one works precisely because it's not trying to play the same type of game as most adult books.
Once again, no idea whether Lincoln intends more with this setting or these characters. I would certainly read more, though I'm not sure a direct sequel would work; the note it ends on is the right kind of unresolved, and continuing on might wreck that. Not to mention that Shenanigan's character arc doesn't feel like it needs more after what we've already seen. But different members of the Swift family at different points in time? I would absolutely be there for that. (This seems to be twentieth-century but possibly the first half thereof, since there are neither cell phones nor computers to be seen.)
Quintessence, David Walton.
Alternate Tudor history of a sort that reminds me of Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters: the world genuinely is flat, the sun gets bigger as you get closer to the edge because the celestial mechanics mean you're also getting closer to the sun as it sets, and the principles ideas of alchemy work, though nobody's actually turning lead into gold. This is also an alternate history that does something I'd ordinarily be a bit chary of: there are no Native Americans of any kind on the island that lies at the western edge of the world (an island which is definitely not North or South America). On the one hand, erasure of that kind isn't great; on the other hand, the sentient inhabitants of the island are also 100% operating on magical biology that is not that of human beings, so trying to present them as being more closely analogous to indigenous Americans would feel weird in a different way. For me it felt all right because the entire setup of the world had been rewritten on such a fundamental level, but others' mileage may vary.
Anyway, the story. It starts off with a bang, as a ship returns from the fabled island of Horizon laden with wondrous treasures . . . but the few surviving crew drop dead shortly after arrival, their internal organs are full of sand and salt, and the "treasures" are likewise just rocks, water, and so forth. A new expedition gets mounted to, among other things, confirm the theory that these substances transformed when they got too far away from the abundant quintessence found in Horizon.
The pacing and balance of attention here felt slightly peculiar to me -- not in a deal-breaking way, but certainly an odd one. For one thing, a lot of the scenes are very short -- barely a page, or less than -- and it doesn't skip over the time gaps between events as gracefully as it might. For another, it takes something like a quarter of the book for the expedition to set out, with that quarter being spent on developing the politics at home in England, where Edward VI is about to kick the bucket and Mary is waiting in the wings. On the one hand it sets up why the expedition carries a bunch of Protestant settlers fleeing Mary's persecution, and some later developments around a Spanish ship, but on the other hand it feels like a lot of time spent on what's being left behind, rather than where they're going. In fact, you're more than halfway through the book before they get to Horizon, and the journey definitely felt like it could have been compressed, with the full nuances of how the captain manages (or fails to manage) the challenges during the voyage ultimately not important enough to merit the amount of attention they got. In some ways I think the pacing has to do with the fact that this book has a sequel, Quintessence Sky, but the end of this volume felt like enough of a reasonable ending that I don't quite feel compelled to read onward.
And my mild frustration with the pacing is because in the end, I was here for the stuff in Horizon -- and I enjoyed that part! The colonists figuring out the special abilities of the different organisms they find there and forming their own equivalent to the Royal Society (a bit precociously; the real Royal Society wasn't founded until the next century) to investigate the source and uses of those abilities was honestly great. I could have done with much more exploration of what the colonists dub the "manticores," too. I wanted more of that, less of the other stuff -- and the second book might deliver it, but the blurb left me a bit too "meh" to really want to pick it up. Alas.
Adirondack Almanac: A Guide to the Natural Year, Tom Kalinowski, ill. Sheri Amsel.
Nothing in this book says explicitly that it's mimicking Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, but the title and the material certainly imply it. Kalinowski goes month by month through the year, telling you what interesting things are going on in the natural world of the Adirondacks -- mostly the animal/insect world, much less the plants, though they show up in the context of animal behavior and occasionally as bits of descriptive detail salted in here and there. He can't remain rigidly chronological without distorting the flow of the material; any given section may make reference to what the robins or the blackflies or the shrews were doing a month or two earlier, or what they'll be doing a month or two from now. But he manages to keep a good enough focus on the activity of that month that it doesn't feel scattershot at all.
This kind of book is a godsend for me if I ever need to write an extended bit set in that kind of environment, because of the focus not only on what exists in a given ecosystem, but what it's doing at any given time. Which critters are breeding, which ones have young, who's going into torpor, who's relaxing the defense of their territory or ramping it up because that can change over the course of the year. If anybody happens to know of more like this and Sand County Almanac, please let me know, because I'd love to collect more.
The Long, Long Life of Trees, Fiona Stafford.
British trees! With occasional nods to their cousins in other parts of the world, but Britain is very much the center of attention here. Which is exactly what I wanted, because I have a verrrrry nascent notion for a story that would lean into the folklore of trees in England. Stafford only intermittently talks about the folklore side, but it's present enough to make this useful to me -- especially since she's fairly scrupulous about noting which trees, despite being ubiquitous in England, are actually newer imports. (For the purposes of my story, that will matter.) Sycamores are a recent arrival, for example, and so are the sweet varieties of apple -- well, for values of "recent" that equate to "Roman." There's a decent amount of illustration in here, as she talks about the attention paid to certain trees by artists, though for some trees I could have done with more examples that show the full thing, rather than just detail shots.
I've got another British book on the subject, too, and though I won't be reading it in the immediate future -- there's only so much tree-focused reading I can absorb at a time -- I'll be interested to see how the two compare.
Aboriginal Legends: Animal Tales, A.W. Reed.
A companion book of sorts to one I posted about a few months ago, Aboriginal Tales of Australia. The titles are no real guide to what to expect in each book; many of the stories in that latter are about animals, because -- presuming this is a representative sample of Aboriginal storytelling -- a lot of their stories thoroughly blur the line between "about animals" and "about people," because the animals are generally behaving in extremely people-like ways. (Also, I think one of the stories in here was also in the other book, though I'd have to go searching through to compare.)
But still, I like reading collections of this sort from a broad range of places, and it's even better when I have more than one, even when they're by the same author. I wouldn't call this riveting reading from a modern fiction standpoint -- most actual folklore isn't -- but it's interesting from the perspective of getting a feel for a different environment and a different society living within it. I wish this book had a glossary like the other did, however flawed it may have been; many of the objects/animals/plants mentioned here are unfamiliar to me, and I wasn't able to find all of them online, at least not with a casual search.
The Surviving Sky, Kritika H. Rao.
This book basically had me at the back cover, because it said one of the protagonists is an archaeologist.
Bad news first: Ahilya is not an archaeologist. I have no flipping clue why she's called one, not just in the cover copy but throughout the book; she in no way, shape, or form studies human society through its material culture. She excavates no sites -- in fact, even the cover copy had me wondering how she could, when the central concept here is that the ground is so badly shredded by frequent storms called "earthrages" that nobody can live on it anymore and must resort to flying cities instead. She studies no artifacts -- those wouldn't really survive, either. The closest she comes to archaeology is reading some old histories and theorizing about the distant past. What she she actually does with most of her research time is tag creatures in the jungle with trackers because she wants to figure out how they manage to survive the earthrages, and that, my friends, is what we might call a field biologist.
The good news is, I'm perfectly happy to read about a field biologist! (So long as I metaphorically plug my ears every time her work is called "archaeology.") And this is genuinely an interesting novel otherwise. For one thing, it does a thing even adult SF/F rarely touches on, which is to write about a married couple; rather than the usual familiar arc of "character meets character, attraction blossoms, HEA," we start with a husband and wife who are badly estranged from one another and whose path back to marital harmony is so much two steps forward, one point nine steps back that they've only just kind of sort of arrived by the end of the book. (This is the start of a series, of what length I don't know -- but I should mention that it ends on a reasonably satisfying note. Not a fully resolved one, to be sure, but if you're okay with the sort of ambiguous closure where the characters have to decide what to do with themselves now, it works.)
It is also, especially by the end, kind of balls-to-the-wall with its sheer ideas in a way I've found in relatively few novels lately. In one sense I think it's easy to see where the story is going; any time you pick up a novel where the party line is "here is the way the world must be because our history and our theories tell us XYZ," you can pretty much guess what's going to turn out to be not true. But the way in which it turns out to be not true . . . that's a different matter. I did not anticipate where this book ended up.
Partly that's because frankly, the whole structure of metaphysics around trajection never quite popped into clarity for me. But since that's a complaint I've also seen about the Rook and Rose series, I feel obliged to say that I stand by my feelings when it's my own book getting that response, which is: do you really have to understand it all? Is explaining that the main thing the story is trying to do, or can you let it slide and focus on the characters and the plot instead? I don't have to be able to write you a clear rundown of trajection and the Resonance and the Moment and the Deepness and stars and ragas and architects' sort-of tattoos; I devoured the book without ever arriving at that point. If you're someone who does feel the need for that clarity, this might well be a frustrating read, but I can vouch for the story being enjoyable without that.
The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman.
I didn't expect to have another book to report on from August. Then my flight to DragonCon in Atlanta got delayed for three hours, and I blew through this while trying to keep myself occupied.
It turns out not to be quite the book I expected. The subtitle and my very vague memory of wherever I saw it recommended made me think it was on how radical ideas get developed, but Beckerman's central thesis is actually quite different. He's interested in the incubation period of revolutionary change -- the stretch of time in which those ideas get developed, tested, and modified, before they burst fully onto the stage -- and argues that this period is necessary for successful revolutions, whether political or ideological. Which is important because the secondary thesis of this book is that social media, at least in certain forms, is actually detrimental to that incubation, and leads to revolutions dying before they can really get traction.
As such, the book exists in two informal halves. The chapters in the first half look at seventeenth-century Europe (early scientific revolution), nineteenth-century Britain (Chartism and the pursuit of universal suffrage), early twentieth-century Italy (the Futurists), 1940s West Africa (independence movements), 1960s Soviet Russia (political dissidents), and the 1990s U.S. (riot grrrls) to study the kinds of networks and tactics those groups developed in pursuit of their goals: respectively, letter-writing, mass petitions, manifestos, newspapers, samizdat, and zines. Then there's an interlude titled "Cyberspace," which steps sideways to discuss the WELL, an early internet community, to make the point that nostalgic reminiscences over the birth of the internet often gloss over how active moderation and community management have always been required to keep the place functioning nicely. After that the attention turns to Tahrir Square in 2011 and the Arab Spring more generally, Charlottesville in 2017 and the neo-Nazi movement, the U.S. in 2020 and doctors in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and Minneapolis in 2020 and Black Lives Matter.
The inflection point around the internet matters, though this isn't simplistically "the internet is bad!" or "the internet is solely to blame!" The Riot Grrrls trend and its associated feminism, Beckerman argues, died young because the spotlight shone in it too soon: what started out with teens and women working with glue sticks and photocopiers suddenly became the focus of magazine articles and interviews, which broke the discourse that was happening between people in what had up until then been an informal movement born out of personal pain. After that, though . . . the effect Facebook and Twitter had on the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt, was to push for bold demonstrations that stood on a foundation of emotion and nothing else, because the activists involved in those things had developed no deeper solidarity, no systems for further organization, no strategy for the future. Circumstances bum-rushed them into what looked like success, but the only people remotely prepared for the next steps were the Muslim Brotherhood, and even they wound up getting stomped by the army reasserting power.
Which is not to say there's no way for the internet to be of use. The Charlottesville chapter is particularly chilling, as it shows how the alt-right was able to use the more closed chambers of Discord to do exactly the kind of work Beckerman argues is necessary, workshopping their ideas and messaging and upcoming actions before debuting those things on the public stage -- but Beckerman points out that just because we currently associate that kind of seclusion and secrecy with bad actors doesn't mean it can't also be turned to good ends. That's the message of the final two chapters, where he shows coalitions of doctors using private email groups to discuss what they did and didn't know about COVID-19 and how to present plans to government officials, and Black activists retreating off the generalized outrage machine of public Twitter to plan the kind of ground-up, local action that can potentially produce actual results in specific communities.
I've gone on at greater length than I meant to, but it's because I think there's a lot to chew on here for people who are tired of Facebook- and Twitter-style social media where the goal is to amass followers and likes rather than concrete change. It also reminded me in many ways of Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which shares the general thesis that such services are actively fragmenting our ability to take meaningful action. As the exodus (X-odus?) from the Service Formerly Known as Twitter continues and we disperse across half a dozen competing networks, it's worth thinking about what kind of behavior those networks encourage and discourage, and where we should be spending our time if we want to make a difference with the problems we're currently facing.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/BlXvXb)
