The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
I loved this guys other book so ding dang much I went and tried to find the beginning, the first one in this shared symbiotic world of 16th-ish century betterEurope. If Earth and Sky was Adriatic merchant city-states and intimate humanities, this book was Moorish Spain and the impact of the Reconquista.
God damn this author doesn't half-ass anything. I should have realized doing two of these back to back would drain me significantly.
It was noticeable, the age difference of this version of Kay than the 16-years-older author I read beforehand. Subtle but there. It seems unbelievably pretentious for me to say 'less mature' but I am unable to find a better turn of phrase.
Everything I said about this guy (Guy) remains true. This is a masterful work of adapted historical fantasy. The characters are human, real, complex. Appropriate. Radical. Gripping?
Tragic. Shakespearean, at times, in its asking of emotional investment and mercilessly wielding the knife for dramatic gain.
More than anything I was reminded of Romance of the Three Kingdoms - mix history with fable with fantasy elements. Turn the drudgery into storytelling. Make people larger than life. Tell a truly tremendous story.
The world is equally fascinating in 10th century Andalusia as it was in the Adriatic coast. Educational! Heartbreaking, and unpleasant, as it always is when you dive into the real horrors people tend to get up to when you mix religion and warfare and culture and power.
Satisfying! A surprisingly excellent rivalry, a well done love triangle? A massive stable of full, growing, vibrant characters. I would kill to see this made into a show. It may be impossible, which is one of the truest signs of a uniquely good book.
Saturday, May 6, 2017
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Crate Digging
Children of Earth and Sky - Guy Gavriel Kay
I didn't know a damn thing about Game of Thrones until the show popped up. I watched the first season and read the first book concurrently, then drank up all the Hennessy that Martin had on his shelf before season 2 came out. So I've read all that meandering shit.
Hear me now, dear reader, when I say that if you're one of those miserable bastards who reads GoT for the court intrigue and adventuring and cultural politic nation building aspects (and not, for example, the rational and proper things like motherfucking dragons and a city definitely destroyed by dark magic, dog, come on) then this book I have here is for you.
Also, good news: if you liked the magic parts, this book also has some of that.
Children of Earth and Sky is vast and complex. The world is rich and dense and realistic, due mostly to it being based off of history. It is essentially traced over 16th century Adriatic Europe, and I almost feel bad telling you that right off the bat because I didn't have it click until the very end of the book.
I brought up Game of Thrones because it has a massive cast of characters and switches between their perspectives, frequently immediately and within the same scene, and has a lot of Rough Realism or Whatever. It is a fantasy book through and through, though. Trough. Tough. God, the English language is a mess.
This book has great depth and will carry you with it. The fantasy equivalents of Prague, of Venice, of Constantinople/Istanbul are real, because they were real, and because the author has great skill and vast knowledge of history and of how to write like a motherfucker.
Turns out this guy is the guy Tolkien's son picked to be his assistant/editor when he compiled a bunch of his dad's unpublished lore. When he was twenty. You might be familiar with the Silmarillion.
This book is devastatingly human. It weaves plots with ruthless shakespearean deftness. It handles women characters in a variety of roles well, which is remarkable.
This is another book I had to eat in parts, over weeks, because of the sheer scope of it. It had the disconcerting tendency to run off with details of the characters lives far into the future, then return to the present for the rest of the characters. It's exhausting to live alongside so many varied and detailed people at once.
It is hard to imagine being able to hold this much in one head at any given time. Both a zoomed in, all-seeing insight into exciting specific lives and an objective, empathetic understanding of the human condition and how short and sweet it can be. And how shitty, and easy to end.
And how SLAVIC everything can be, that side of the Mediterranean.
Do not be like me, dear reader - a poor uneducated fool who confuses the Baltic and Balkan regions. If you hear 'Croatia' and think "haha, potatoes! vodka! latvia!" then you are like me and a big stupid idiot. That's up in the Baltic region, dumbo! Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro? Those are Balkan!
They are firmly in tomato europe territory and their history is fucking fascinating as evidenced by the fact that this book that mines them for fantasy worldbuilding is one of the best damn things I've read in a while.
Hey remember how I'm obsessed with magic systems revolving around the nonconcatenative morphology of the triconsonantal root of semitic languages?
MOVE OVER ITS PROTO BALTO SLAVIC TIME
I didn't know a damn thing about Game of Thrones until the show popped up. I watched the first season and read the first book concurrently, then drank up all the Hennessy that Martin had on his shelf before season 2 came out. So I've read all that meandering shit.
Hear me now, dear reader, when I say that if you're one of those miserable bastards who reads GoT for the court intrigue and adventuring and cultural politic nation building aspects (and not, for example, the rational and proper things like motherfucking dragons and a city definitely destroyed by dark magic, dog, come on) then this book I have here is for you.
Also, good news: if you liked the magic parts, this book also has some of that.
Children of Earth and Sky is vast and complex. The world is rich and dense and realistic, due mostly to it being based off of history. It is essentially traced over 16th century Adriatic Europe, and I almost feel bad telling you that right off the bat because I didn't have it click until the very end of the book.
I brought up Game of Thrones because it has a massive cast of characters and switches between their perspectives, frequently immediately and within the same scene, and has a lot of Rough Realism or Whatever. It is a fantasy book through and through, though. Trough. Tough. God, the English language is a mess.
This book has great depth and will carry you with it. The fantasy equivalents of Prague, of Venice, of Constantinople/Istanbul are real, because they were real, and because the author has great skill and vast knowledge of history and of how to write like a motherfucker.
Turns out this guy is the guy Tolkien's son picked to be his assistant/editor when he compiled a bunch of his dad's unpublished lore. When he was twenty. You might be familiar with the Silmarillion.
This book is devastatingly human. It weaves plots with ruthless shakespearean deftness. It handles women characters in a variety of roles well, which is remarkable.
This is another book I had to eat in parts, over weeks, because of the sheer scope of it. It had the disconcerting tendency to run off with details of the characters lives far into the future, then return to the present for the rest of the characters. It's exhausting to live alongside so many varied and detailed people at once.
It is hard to imagine being able to hold this much in one head at any given time. Both a zoomed in, all-seeing insight into exciting specific lives and an objective, empathetic understanding of the human condition and how short and sweet it can be. And how shitty, and easy to end.
And how SLAVIC everything can be, that side of the Mediterranean.
Do not be like me, dear reader - a poor uneducated fool who confuses the Baltic and Balkan regions. If you hear 'Croatia' and think "haha, potatoes! vodka! latvia!" then you are like me and a big stupid idiot. That's up in the Baltic region, dumbo! Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro? Those are Balkan!
They are firmly in tomato europe territory and their history is fucking fascinating as evidenced by the fact that this book that mines them for fantasy worldbuilding is one of the best damn things I've read in a while.
Hey remember how I'm obsessed with magic systems revolving around the nonconcatenative morphology of the triconsonantal root of semitic languages?
MOVE OVER ITS PROTO BALTO SLAVIC TIME
Thursday, March 30, 2017
You're doing terrific
Od Magic - Patricia A. McKillip
I got maybe two chapters into this book before being overcome with a peculiar and familiar emotion that I felt more frequently as a child immediately before something wondrous was going to happen. A physical, tingly tug at my breastbone keel as my tiny kid body wondered what was in the christmas presents, or how awesome this new videogame was about to be. I kept getting brought out of reading this book by how excited I was to have found it, to be reading it.
This book is about magic, and concerns a variety of people in a fantasy world. Princesses, wizard teachers, schools of magic, roving entertainers, captains of the guard. Young individuals drawn by destiny and fate, in motion due to the past or the future. If this sounds vague and bland, consider the previous paragraphs emotion and wonder then what artistry a book must have to do so much with such tropes. Some books have deep, defined characters, some have relatively flat characters. This book's characters were like lit windows into mansions at night - a conveyance of vastness through economically smaller descriptions. This book made me want to write a book about magic. This book made me reconsider my hierarchy of magic systems.
Patricia McKillip somehow eluded my childhood but I am honored to add her to it now, joining her cohorts of Wynne Jones and Le Guin in the Hall of Unassuming Little Grandmothers who Know Magic. Pratchett is there too, because he learned to ask.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories - Susanna Clarke
Similarly to The Chimes, this collection of short stories set in the authors Jonathan Strange universe gives the distinct impression of being written by someone who is not only an author but also exceedingly knowledgeable about some other area as well - in this case replacing classical music with Romanticism. The original book, another disgustingly accomplished first novel, is absolutely fabulous if chewy as fuck due to its faithful reproduction of the writing styles of the era. Read it, that you may enjoy these additional peeks into the world. Clarke handles the 'fae' part of magic as a trope real fuckin' well but honestly you'd probably like this just as much if you spurned most fantasy and only loved Jane Austen. The seelie folk are terrifying, capricious, very alien and mercurial. Having scenarios be described in prim Regency era prose is jarring, but makes for good reading. Every time I read collections of short stories I desire to read more short stories. It is a good cycle.
The House of the Stag - Kage Baker
This book was an unexpected ridiculous adventure. Told like a fuckin....Robert E. Howard novel, like a folk tale bildungsroman of these crazy overpowered characters just being awesome. Sad, sometimes. Hardship, slavery, castigation. But also rad as hell with lots of demons and swords and fucking. Willing acceptance is required but once you go with it it's quite enjoyable - it reads like a folk tale, like an old fable. Like the Kalevala. Like a play? Shit just happens. It reads like Hercules. The world is very nicely wide, very interesting. This book is technically a prequel, but written after, the next book I'm reading, and I'm glad I read this one first. I hope these huge mythic characters show up in it. It reads like a dungeons and dragons characters backstory? It reads like there should be elves, but there aren't any elves. The demons are the best part by far by FAR. Buckwild and a little jarringly abrupt at some parts as we transition from life chapter to life chapter, but all around a good read. This is what that asshole drow idiot character all the DnD books are about SHOULD have been. Drizzztitt or whatever. Some fucker with two named swords and a brooding backstory. Dark elf jerkoff. The guy in this book is way better. That is the perfect comparison.
The Anvil of the World - Kage Baker
I am very glad I read the prequel, written a few years afterwards, first. This book gave me very strong early Terry Pratchett vibes - the parts where he hadn't really settled in to finding that groove. It read like a book from the 80s. Almost tongue in cheek fantasy at times. Sort of winking at the audience but also taking itself seriously? I'm glad I was familiar with many of the characters backstories which didn't exist yet. Confusing. VERY Ankh-Morporkian, the more I think about it. Similar to the last-first book in its abrupt scene changes and having shit just happen, but also similar in its vast and unexplained mythos. Demons and their ilk once again steal the show. I guess this is a book about growing up and destinies? It is hard to say what this book is about, much less what it was TRYING to be about. Apparently there's a third one, which now I must read.
I got maybe two chapters into this book before being overcome with a peculiar and familiar emotion that I felt more frequently as a child immediately before something wondrous was going to happen. A physical, tingly tug at my breastbone keel as my tiny kid body wondered what was in the christmas presents, or how awesome this new videogame was about to be. I kept getting brought out of reading this book by how excited I was to have found it, to be reading it.
This book is about magic, and concerns a variety of people in a fantasy world. Princesses, wizard teachers, schools of magic, roving entertainers, captains of the guard. Young individuals drawn by destiny and fate, in motion due to the past or the future. If this sounds vague and bland, consider the previous paragraphs emotion and wonder then what artistry a book must have to do so much with such tropes. Some books have deep, defined characters, some have relatively flat characters. This book's characters were like lit windows into mansions at night - a conveyance of vastness through economically smaller descriptions. This book made me want to write a book about magic. This book made me reconsider my hierarchy of magic systems.
Patricia McKillip somehow eluded my childhood but I am honored to add her to it now, joining her cohorts of Wynne Jones and Le Guin in the Hall of Unassuming Little Grandmothers who Know Magic. Pratchett is there too, because he learned to ask.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories - Susanna Clarke
Similarly to The Chimes, this collection of short stories set in the authors Jonathan Strange universe gives the distinct impression of being written by someone who is not only an author but also exceedingly knowledgeable about some other area as well - in this case replacing classical music with Romanticism. The original book, another disgustingly accomplished first novel, is absolutely fabulous if chewy as fuck due to its faithful reproduction of the writing styles of the era. Read it, that you may enjoy these additional peeks into the world. Clarke handles the 'fae' part of magic as a trope real fuckin' well but honestly you'd probably like this just as much if you spurned most fantasy and only loved Jane Austen. The seelie folk are terrifying, capricious, very alien and mercurial. Having scenarios be described in prim Regency era prose is jarring, but makes for good reading. Every time I read collections of short stories I desire to read more short stories. It is a good cycle.
The House of the Stag - Kage Baker
This book was an unexpected ridiculous adventure. Told like a fuckin....Robert E. Howard novel, like a folk tale bildungsroman of these crazy overpowered characters just being awesome. Sad, sometimes. Hardship, slavery, castigation. But also rad as hell with lots of demons and swords and fucking. Willing acceptance is required but once you go with it it's quite enjoyable - it reads like a folk tale, like an old fable. Like the Kalevala. Like a play? Shit just happens. It reads like Hercules. The world is very nicely wide, very interesting. This book is technically a prequel, but written after, the next book I'm reading, and I'm glad I read this one first. I hope these huge mythic characters show up in it. It reads like a dungeons and dragons characters backstory? It reads like there should be elves, but there aren't any elves. The demons are the best part by far by FAR. Buckwild and a little jarringly abrupt at some parts as we transition from life chapter to life chapter, but all around a good read. This is what that asshole drow idiot character all the DnD books are about SHOULD have been. Drizzztitt or whatever. Some fucker with two named swords and a brooding backstory. Dark elf jerkoff. The guy in this book is way better. That is the perfect comparison.
The Anvil of the World - Kage Baker
I am very glad I read the prequel, written a few years afterwards, first. This book gave me very strong early Terry Pratchett vibes - the parts where he hadn't really settled in to finding that groove. It read like a book from the 80s. Almost tongue in cheek fantasy at times. Sort of winking at the audience but also taking itself seriously? I'm glad I was familiar with many of the characters backstories which didn't exist yet. Confusing. VERY Ankh-Morporkian, the more I think about it. Similar to the last-first book in its abrupt scene changes and having shit just happen, but also similar in its vast and unexplained mythos. Demons and their ilk once again steal the show. I guess this is a book about growing up and destinies? It is hard to say what this book is about, much less what it was TRYING to be about. Apparently there's a third one, which now I must read.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Keep at it.
The Etched City - K.J. Bishop
This book is mad, and maddening. This book is dark and meandering and meaningless. This book makes Perdido Street Station seem coherent and simple. This book is about....cities, and people. Good and evil. Transformation. Rumination. Death and killing. Life and rebirth. It is important that you understand my lack of hyperbole when I say I looked up, on average, one word every three pages for the majority of this book. Dense. Verbose. Dialectical. Baroque, massive, incredibly ostentatiously well educated. This book made me feel inadequate for several reasons. It conveyed the concept of weight and gravity and immense meaning out of my reach. I refuse to believe this was someone's first novel. This was written by a malevolent Oscar Wilde fan-cum-member of the Unseelie Court.
Talk about dreams. This book was an opium haze clouded Mieville-esque, classically trained Naked Lunch ass steampunk fuckin' Heart of Darkness ass fuckin Park Chan-wook Shakespeare tragedy hallucination. This book fucked me up and will fuck you up. Fuck this book. I've looked forward to doing this post-book writeup since the second half of this thing just so I could spit it out and thus loosen the hold this book has on me. Vague and violent. Calmly unpleasant. Disgustingly ornate. Unconcerned with whether you'll read it or not. Unconcerned with arriving at any goal. Ugh.
Alif the Unseen - G. Willow Wilson
This book reminded me of the Three Body Problem in that it was unknowingly foreign for my أجنبي-ass brain at parts. I did a lot of looking up research for this book as well. Books that involve Islamic mythology and/or are set in predominantly Muslim countries are inherently religious, more so than I think other ethno-religo-culturo whatevers. It's more deeply ingrained in....every part of life. So this book, set in speculative near-future (what I have to assume is) Dubai, was simultaneously a somewhat simplistic (almost Artemis Fowlian?) YA about a hacker fucking his life up with jinn but also a complex and mystifying insight into how goddamn far removed my own personal experiences are compared to life the Middle East in every goddamn way. This book concerns growing up, a Mr-Robot level okay depiction of Computer Skills, djinn being real as hell, the comparative insanities of the complicated socio-economic strata of the Arabian peninsula, the inextricable nature of Islam from all aspects of life. I am unsure how to describe YA fiction without sounding patronizing to teens. The actual plot of it was fine. Unsurprising but done well, depicted well in a living world. It is hard to say something is written for a younger audience, I don't know. It isn't like people don't fuck and/or die in this book. They also pray? Where do we draw the Teen Line.
Redemption in Indigo - Karen Lord
This book is an expansion on an old Senegalese folk story, written by someone disgustingly clever and well traveled and with a PhD in sociology of religion. It follows the enjoyable folktale-telling prosody of stuff like Rudyard Kipling - kindly grandparents filling the kids brains up with stories, deftly skipping over any questioning of the impossibilities contained therein and thus avoiding unpleasant mundanities. Plus it uses the nice storyteller-esque thing of having chapter titles be descriptive sentences of the upcoming events. The story concerns humans and immortals and trickster spirits and the principles of chaos and choice and change. It's quite short but well told, and unfolds beautifully. Folk stories are nice because you don't have to bother with explaining anything. If the storyteller says djombi are real, and the spider plays tricks on mankind, it is so! Bringing old stories forward is important, and in reading you can see that this book understands this and does it right.
This book is mad, and maddening. This book is dark and meandering and meaningless. This book makes Perdido Street Station seem coherent and simple. This book is about....cities, and people. Good and evil. Transformation. Rumination. Death and killing. Life and rebirth. It is important that you understand my lack of hyperbole when I say I looked up, on average, one word every three pages for the majority of this book. Dense. Verbose. Dialectical. Baroque, massive, incredibly ostentatiously well educated. This book made me feel inadequate for several reasons. It conveyed the concept of weight and gravity and immense meaning out of my reach. I refuse to believe this was someone's first novel. This was written by a malevolent Oscar Wilde fan-cum-member of the Unseelie Court.
Talk about dreams. This book was an opium haze clouded Mieville-esque, classically trained Naked Lunch ass steampunk fuckin' Heart of Darkness ass fuckin Park Chan-wook Shakespeare tragedy hallucination. This book fucked me up and will fuck you up. Fuck this book. I've looked forward to doing this post-book writeup since the second half of this thing just so I could spit it out and thus loosen the hold this book has on me. Vague and violent. Calmly unpleasant. Disgustingly ornate. Unconcerned with whether you'll read it or not. Unconcerned with arriving at any goal. Ugh.
Alif the Unseen - G. Willow Wilson
This book reminded me of the Three Body Problem in that it was unknowingly foreign for my أجنبي-ass brain at parts. I did a lot of looking up research for this book as well. Books that involve Islamic mythology and/or are set in predominantly Muslim countries are inherently religious, more so than I think other ethno-religo-culturo whatevers. It's more deeply ingrained in....every part of life. So this book, set in speculative near-future (what I have to assume is) Dubai, was simultaneously a somewhat simplistic (almost Artemis Fowlian?) YA about a hacker fucking his life up with jinn but also a complex and mystifying insight into how goddamn far removed my own personal experiences are compared to life the Middle East in every goddamn way. This book concerns growing up, a Mr-Robot level okay depiction of Computer Skills, djinn being real as hell, the comparative insanities of the complicated socio-economic strata of the Arabian peninsula, the inextricable nature of Islam from all aspects of life. I am unsure how to describe YA fiction without sounding patronizing to teens. The actual plot of it was fine. Unsurprising but done well, depicted well in a living world. It is hard to say something is written for a younger audience, I don't know. It isn't like people don't fuck and/or die in this book. They also pray? Where do we draw the Teen Line.
Redemption in Indigo - Karen Lord
This book is an expansion on an old Senegalese folk story, written by someone disgustingly clever and well traveled and with a PhD in sociology of religion. It follows the enjoyable folktale-telling prosody of stuff like Rudyard Kipling - kindly grandparents filling the kids brains up with stories, deftly skipping over any questioning of the impossibilities contained therein and thus avoiding unpleasant mundanities. Plus it uses the nice storyteller-esque thing of having chapter titles be descriptive sentences of the upcoming events. The story concerns humans and immortals and trickster spirits and the principles of chaos and choice and change. It's quite short but well told, and unfolds beautifully. Folk stories are nice because you don't have to bother with explaining anything. If the storyteller says djombi are real, and the spider plays tricks on mankind, it is so! Bringing old stories forward is important, and in reading you can see that this book understands this and does it right.
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
I Enjoyed That
The nice thing about having a Kindle is that it constantly reminds you of your collection. Here! Here are the books you've read! Here are the words you've looked up! Here's how long it'll take to get to the next chapter!
It's an astounding machine, and possibly the best gift I've ever gotten. I haven't really thought about ranking gifts received so far, but it's up there. Both of the ones I've gotten are up there.
Here's what I've been up to in 2017.
Kraken - China Mieville
While I was reading Embassytown, I got given a hard copy of this book. Paperbacks are jarring now. Double pages are nice, but the inability to cart them about or longpress a word to get immediate gratification definitions are too big of a downside to ever go back.
Mieville, as I always feel obligated to mention, is always a hit or miss. Kraken, then, was a surprising medium - an interesting story about an unwittingly special guy getting sucked into an otherworldly power struggle with lots of the ol' Meiville special sauce. Say it with me now - Cities as Organisms, The Vast Magical Underworld, Sadist Enemies As Art, Language and the Written Word as Power, Weird Shit. Points against it were it being set in the modern world, which I think limits his strengths as an insane worldbuilder, and the unnecessaryness/flatness of some of his characters. I read it a little bit at a time each night, which I don't normally do. Small bites.
The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin
The sequel to my 2016 best dang book, The Fifth Season, which picks up from the first book's ending at a satisfyingly-well-led-up-to reveal. Boy, that's a real shit sentence I just put together huh.
The Obelisk Gate expands on the existing universe way more dramatically than the first book - it's almost jarring how openly some tantalizingly mystifying lore stuff is discussed compared to Fifth Season. Some new characters show up, some old characters are revised and I'm very into it. First book was more polar in who was 'good' and who was 'bad', despite the myriad character flaws. This one is way more grey and I'm not sure who's side I'm on. I feel like constantly comparing it to the first book robs it of its own weight, but I'm also having a hard time finding any other point of reference. It's a sequel. If you liked the Fifth Season, and of course you did it's butternut squash, you're gonna shit your pants at the second half of this book.
So I finished it and went digging, and found out the third and final book is coming out at the end of this year, which is simultaneously batshit that someone can chug out a book a year of this quality and also excruciatingly a million years away.
Luckily she wrote other, earlier stuff! A fantasy series!
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin
The idea that this is somebody's debut novel is gross because it's so good. The aforementioned Broken Earth series, while utilizing (quite literally) magic, isn't categorized as 'fantasy' in my brain. The fantastical elements are handled too clinically, scientifically. I'd almost call it science fiction. Some beautiful mesh of the two. This book, the first in her Inheritance trilogy, is mother fucking fantasy. Crazy ass ruling caste floating kingdoms powered by chained gods. An entire universe built on cosmogonic myth. A girl thrown into the middle of it all. Once again, my lack of Court Intrigue experience led to me being absolutely delighted. The world is exquisite and detailed. The characters are fascinating. The sex with gods is abundant and unexpected. The gods themselves are choice. It is a very, very well done mythology. Almost tolkeinesque in its "this was definitely created as a mythos first and then a story just sort of spooled out of it".
If the Broken Earth left you wanting more magic and godfucking and rebirth, you're in luck.
The Broken Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin
Okay so first of all, there's three of these books. Loosely connected in the sense that it involves some threading characters, mostly a-thefuckinggodsthemselves, in the same universe. Maybe a decade later. BOY is it going to be hard to talk about this one without spoiling the first one in a major way.
This one is not a sequel, it's just the next one in the story. If that is a thing. The world has changed, significantly, and this book does a wonderful job of shifting the tone and focus to accommodate it. It is a smaller story, a much more introspective and insular personal story, as befits the...necessary...changing. Jemisin writes achingly human characters, including the gods. She refuses to avoid the universal threads of sadness that are a natural part of life. It is impossible to talk about this book further without spoiling it. It isn't necessary to enjoy the first one! You can read the first one in its own right. It ties up nicely. But obviously read this one too.
The Kingdom of Gods - N.K. Jemisin
This book. Thiiiiis motherfuckin book. This book cuts deep, in that it absolutely makes some deep references to the first two and also wrecks you emotionally. This book is about gods and what that means and humans and what that means and how ones nature shapes who one is. And vice versa, I suppose. If the first two books are building up the world this one is taking it and running with it into oblivion. This book is about a trickster god growing up in every sense of the word, and the humans he drags along. This book is long. Several times I was confident I was at the end and then shit went all Gurren Lagann and I got ten more chapters. This book is good. An Amber Spyglass sort of trilogy tie-up. Which should tell you just about everything you need to know to make a decision on whether or not to read this series.
I took a break after that. Obviously. Then I went and harvested a new crop that I'm quite excited for.
I'm currently maybe...3/4ths done with
The Chimes - Anna Smaill
This book is a post-post-apocalyptic dreamy mystery written by someone with far too much technical knowledge on music. The story plays with unreliable narrators since lost memories are sort of a central theme, as is the music that steals them and creates them. It's dense, with a lot of clever musical wordplay that is absolutely mystifying unless you do some research into modern European classical music. It has an unapologetic musical jargon. This is another book I have to read in spurts, because it is slow and intentionally obfuscated. It reminds me of Amnesia Moon (Jonathan Lethem), mostly because that book also was dreamy and dreary and foggy.
The book is interesting enough to keep me reading but I sure hope there's a good payoff at the end because otherwise the 'being set in a post-post-apocalyptic semi-dystopian London" thing is a hard strike against it. It would've been nicer, I suspect, to just be its own world.
But I cannot think of a situation in which that wouldn't be the case. I just hate using Future Earth as an alien setting. Why not just make an alien setting? Then you're free. And this is my own personal opinion, unrelated to the review.
It's an astounding machine, and possibly the best gift I've ever gotten. I haven't really thought about ranking gifts received so far, but it's up there. Both of the ones I've gotten are up there.
Here's what I've been up to in 2017.
Kraken - China Mieville
While I was reading Embassytown, I got given a hard copy of this book. Paperbacks are jarring now. Double pages are nice, but the inability to cart them about or longpress a word to get immediate gratification definitions are too big of a downside to ever go back.
Mieville, as I always feel obligated to mention, is always a hit or miss. Kraken, then, was a surprising medium - an interesting story about an unwittingly special guy getting sucked into an otherworldly power struggle with lots of the ol' Meiville special sauce. Say it with me now - Cities as Organisms, The Vast Magical Underworld, Sadist Enemies As Art, Language and the Written Word as Power, Weird Shit. Points against it were it being set in the modern world, which I think limits his strengths as an insane worldbuilder, and the unnecessaryness/flatness of some of his characters. I read it a little bit at a time each night, which I don't normally do. Small bites.
The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin
The sequel to my 2016 best dang book, The Fifth Season, which picks up from the first book's ending at a satisfyingly-well-led-up-to reveal. Boy, that's a real shit sentence I just put together huh.
The Obelisk Gate expands on the existing universe way more dramatically than the first book - it's almost jarring how openly some tantalizingly mystifying lore stuff is discussed compared to Fifth Season. Some new characters show up, some old characters are revised and I'm very into it. First book was more polar in who was 'good' and who was 'bad', despite the myriad character flaws. This one is way more grey and I'm not sure who's side I'm on. I feel like constantly comparing it to the first book robs it of its own weight, but I'm also having a hard time finding any other point of reference. It's a sequel. If you liked the Fifth Season, and of course you did it's butternut squash, you're gonna shit your pants at the second half of this book.
So I finished it and went digging, and found out the third and final book is coming out at the end of this year, which is simultaneously batshit that someone can chug out a book a year of this quality and also excruciatingly a million years away.
Luckily she wrote other, earlier stuff! A fantasy series!
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin
The idea that this is somebody's debut novel is gross because it's so good. The aforementioned Broken Earth series, while utilizing (quite literally) magic, isn't categorized as 'fantasy' in my brain. The fantastical elements are handled too clinically, scientifically. I'd almost call it science fiction. Some beautiful mesh of the two. This book, the first in her Inheritance trilogy, is mother fucking fantasy. Crazy ass ruling caste floating kingdoms powered by chained gods. An entire universe built on cosmogonic myth. A girl thrown into the middle of it all. Once again, my lack of Court Intrigue experience led to me being absolutely delighted. The world is exquisite and detailed. The characters are fascinating. The sex with gods is abundant and unexpected. The gods themselves are choice. It is a very, very well done mythology. Almost tolkeinesque in its "this was definitely created as a mythos first and then a story just sort of spooled out of it".
If the Broken Earth left you wanting more magic and godfucking and rebirth, you're in luck.
The Broken Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin
Okay so first of all, there's three of these books. Loosely connected in the sense that it involves some threading characters, mostly a-thefuckinggodsthemselves, in the same universe. Maybe a decade later. BOY is it going to be hard to talk about this one without spoiling the first one in a major way.
This one is not a sequel, it's just the next one in the story. If that is a thing. The world has changed, significantly, and this book does a wonderful job of shifting the tone and focus to accommodate it. It is a smaller story, a much more introspective and insular personal story, as befits the...necessary...changing. Jemisin writes achingly human characters, including the gods. She refuses to avoid the universal threads of sadness that are a natural part of life. It is impossible to talk about this book further without spoiling it. It isn't necessary to enjoy the first one! You can read the first one in its own right. It ties up nicely. But obviously read this one too.
The Kingdom of Gods - N.K. Jemisin
This book. Thiiiiis motherfuckin book. This book cuts deep, in that it absolutely makes some deep references to the first two and also wrecks you emotionally. This book is about gods and what that means and humans and what that means and how ones nature shapes who one is. And vice versa, I suppose. If the first two books are building up the world this one is taking it and running with it into oblivion. This book is about a trickster god growing up in every sense of the word, and the humans he drags along. This book is long. Several times I was confident I was at the end and then shit went all Gurren Lagann and I got ten more chapters. This book is good. An Amber Spyglass sort of trilogy tie-up. Which should tell you just about everything you need to know to make a decision on whether or not to read this series.
I took a break after that. Obviously. Then I went and harvested a new crop that I'm quite excited for.
I'm currently maybe...3/4ths done with
The Chimes - Anna Smaill
This book is a post-post-apocalyptic dreamy mystery written by someone with far too much technical knowledge on music. The story plays with unreliable narrators since lost memories are sort of a central theme, as is the music that steals them and creates them. It's dense, with a lot of clever musical wordplay that is absolutely mystifying unless you do some research into modern European classical music. It has an unapologetic musical jargon. This is another book I have to read in spurts, because it is slow and intentionally obfuscated. It reminds me of Amnesia Moon (Jonathan Lethem), mostly because that book also was dreamy and dreary and foggy.
The book is interesting enough to keep me reading but I sure hope there's a good payoff at the end because otherwise the 'being set in a post-post-apocalyptic semi-dystopian London" thing is a hard strike against it. It would've been nicer, I suspect, to just be its own world.
But I cannot think of a situation in which that wouldn't be the case. I just hate using Future Earth as an alien setting. Why not just make an alien setting? Then you're free. And this is my own personal opinion, unrelated to the review.
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Review
Hello my poor baby blog. As your grandparents once rustled through the attic storage and found lovingly bundled up love letters, so too will your generation revisit old blags and marvel at our once-treasured leavings.
I've spewed a lot of stupid garbage over the years, most of it right here.
George Orwell wrote a fantastic essay that I might have referenced once or twice before, about the various reasons anyone (himself included) bother to write at all. It came down to four very wide-reaching and frequently overlapping categories:
Political Purpose i.e. to transmit ideology
Historical Impulse to record and share
Aesthetic Enthusiasm writing for the fun and/or beauty of it
Sheer Egoism (and here I am going to directly quote him) "Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one."
I think we can all agree which camp this blog, and most blogs, and most of the pablum I've made for my own satisfaction falls under.
Not that that's necessarily a negative thing, it's just important to have a firm grasp of one's initial reason for doing anything.
I've never deleted anything I've put up here. I haven't even touched my Xanga, which extended further back all the way to ten years ago. Not because I'm not embarrassed - the opposite, in fact! - but because it would be a shame to erase such an earnest and genuine resource and time capsule.
I suppose people still have diaries, but the notion of an online diary that is intentionally made available to an audience of infinite hypothetical size would probably get you a few pennies in an early science fiction magazine.
I've sort of stopped writing here, as I changed beyond the sort of person who would derive anything from the thought of someone else reading something I wrote. Growing "up" implies a sort of linear and hierarchical path that only works until you reach maximum bone density. Does a 20 year old grow 'up' into 30? I'm definitely aging. I don't know if I'm maturing. I'm not convinced I've been growing anything lately.
But I have read some good books!
That was the impetus behind this, you see. There's a love of 'year in review' type valedictories, especially for years with as much garbage as this one. I've never been able to do one myself, due to a combination of an inability to remember events as anchored in specific timeframes and a general lack of enough yearly events to make a satisfying read. Also, a lot of the media I experience doesn't come from the year I experienced it in, which sort of defeats the purpose.
But I have read some good books.
Here are some of the ones I read this year, in no particular order.
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
The Sparrow is a story about the discovery of intelligent alien life and what happens when we make first contact. The fact that I can sum that up in a single sentence is as staggeringly remarkable as it is misleading and uninformative. The Sparrow is a story about humanity, and God, and family, and God, and discovery, and God. I learned a lot about the Jesuits, who as far as religious societies go are pretty alright. I have a negative view about proselytizing and missionaries in general, I think it's disingenuous to offer aid with the caveat of conversion. But I also understand it comes from compassion, and has fascinating history. As a book, The Sparrow is engaging, and is told well. As a science fiction novel, it is exceedingly successful - at creating a multifaceted alien society, at realistic space travel, at conveying a sense of otherworldly wonder. It is also very hard to get through at some points, from an emotional standpoint. If I felt qualified to dispense trigger warnings, this book would get a whole lot of them.
Children of God - Mary Doria Russell
Children of God is the sequel to The Sparrow, which I am unsure needed a sequel or not. You would think reading it would give me a better opinion, but I remain unsure. It's a direct and immediate sequel to the above story, so everything said so far applies. It is a perfect counterpart to the initial discovery/miracle themes of the first book in that it is focused much more on the aftermath/revolution. I would say it is required if you liked the first book. It has more flaws but also a much grander scope then the first. The conclusions are satisfyingly, unpleasantly true to life.
The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
This book is also about the discovery of intelligent alien life and what happens. I did not plan this, but apparently that is the sort of book that gets Hugo nominations. This book is tremendously, immensely popular in its native China. It is the first in a trilogy, and despite an excellent, thorough, and helpfully annotated translation this book is fucking incomprehensible to my western-ass mind. It plot is fascinating but split into a million pieces. Things that I suspect are supposed to read like big reveals come across in the most unexpected places. Things I was fascinated by go unexplained, while boring minutiae get center stage. The final third of this book is bonkers bananas and I read the wikipedia summaries for the next two books and I STILL don't know what is going on. A very conflicting book.
The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Addison is the penname of Sarah Monette, who apparently decided to publish in the same genre she works in normally under another name just to see if she could. Which is some baller shit, since it got showered in awards anyway. The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy story about a young man unfortunately becoming emperor and having to deal with it. I really infrequently go full on court-drama-intrigue in my book choice, but this story remained engaging and satisfying despite being 100% about elf politics. The book deals with race, shitty families, aristocracies, and what it means to rule. Also it keeps dropping these unexplained fantasy bombs that hint at this insanely detailed fleshed out elf and goblin populated steampunk ass world that aren't followed up on, which is my jam. I love it when authors are confident enough to not explain every fantasy aspect of their universes. This book was really good.
The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season is about a fantasy world where earthbending is real and the planet is inimical to life sometimes. It is also about loss, society, power structures, gender, and what happens when things fall apart. This book is one of the most well written and captivating stories I have read in a very long time, and if I was pressed would suggest this book above all others for 2017's capstone. The world is perfect in its creation and expression. The magic system is CHOICE. It is 100% emoji FIRE crying laughing face emoji. It is so good. Apparently it is the first book in a series and I am very glad of that fact. Several times while reading the book, I became acutely glad that this book that I was reading had been written, and was received with acclaim. I am glad that books like this are being written, because these are the sort of books that needed and need to be written and read by people growing up. Let this be the new face of science fiction and fantasy going forward, PLEASE.
Read this fucking book.
The Golem and the Jinni - Helene WreckerMy mom clued me into this book, and for that I thank her. The Golem and the Jinni is a book about a golem and a jinni and their lives in turn of the 19th century New York. That's it, that's the book. It is about the Old World and the New World and being human and not being human and trying to survive and maintain vital connections. The fantasy elements are super solid. Also, it's just straight up neat sometimes to read about life for these displaced peoples in this great big melting pot we call big-A-America.The characters are engaging and well defined and elicit compassion. A necessary trait in these trying times. Another book we should make sure the next generation has the opportunity to read if they choose.
Embassytown - China Mieville
Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a book I hold in a special place for stories that are fascinating, alien, and are guaranteed to emotionally destroy me. On the rare occasion I recommend them to a friend it comes with a hefty warning that this book will fuck you up, and fuck your dreams up.
His other books are hit and miss, and his writing has a tendency to really crawl up its own asshole but if you're cognizant of it you can avoid getting sucked in.
I'm actually about halfway through Embassytown right now, but it's definitely got that characteristic Mieville flavor. Aliens, cities, using ancient words casually and like weapons, the deconstruction and deification of language, the vices of civilization, all wrapped up in incomprehensibly dense and chewy worldbuilding. I'm reserving judgement until I reach the end, but I felt I should include it in this list.
The last and largest book, or series of books, requires some explanation.
I was told to investigate an author, C. J. Cherryh, on the promise of wizardry and cool fantasy shit.
Due to a twist in fate that I haven't experienced since the early P2P era, the copy of the book I read was not in fact a book about sweet Slavic fantasy wizard shit.
It was about a space station and crisis and the fragmentation of humanity once we get out there in the dark.
Downbelow Station - C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow drops you off in a world that is already fully defined, and it's your job to figure shit out.
Downbelow is a book about a space station orbiting the first sentient alien world we find, and its handling of a sudden influx of refugees fleeing conflict halfway across the universe. The aliens are basically an afterthought to the somehow far more fascinating huge cast of characters trying to survive in this incredibly detailed, science fiction embedded super shitty environment. These grand sci-fi epics have a very specific flavor they carry, that is simultaneous appreciation and wonderment at the sheer SCOPE of the world this author has made. Shit like Dune and Foundation elicit a sense of something incomprehensibly vast and detailed, something you can't imagine a human being pulling out of their head. The fact that it's a compelling story is almost a delightful, unnecessary surprise to the creation of this world.
And indeed, Downbelow was simply the first gateway into Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe.
I read eleven books in this universe in the span of about a month and a half, in a disgusting display of gluttony for more radical space shit.
These are high class, early 80's science fiction novels about life on space stations, life on planets so far removed from old Earth that they're practically alien, life on planets where human and alien create something new, life on spaceships that fling themselves through rips in reality so violently that if you were conscious during the transition you'd lose your fucking mind.
Every single book is different and unique and adds something to the world, and they span a dizzying number of sub genres.
Cyteen is amazing and probably the best. Finity's End is actually the best, nevermind.
Forty Thouasnd in Gehenna is as bold an attempt as Asmiov's Foundation in terms of zipping wildly through generations of storylines at the turn of a chapter. Merchanter's Luck and Rimrunners are simultaneously light, action driven and full of heavy-ass shit, my dude.
The Alliance-Union universe is some of the best science fiction that I know of, man.
I read a bunch of other books this year, some by the same authors listed above, but as far as ones that carried enough weight to punch through me and onto this list, this is a satisfying amount.
I've spewed a lot of stupid garbage over the years, most of it right here.
George Orwell wrote a fantastic essay that I might have referenced once or twice before, about the various reasons anyone (himself included) bother to write at all. It came down to four very wide-reaching and frequently overlapping categories:
Political Purpose i.e. to transmit ideology
Historical Impulse to record and share
Aesthetic Enthusiasm writing for the fun and/or beauty of it
Sheer Egoism (and here I am going to directly quote him) "Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one."
I think we can all agree which camp this blog, and most blogs, and most of the pablum I've made for my own satisfaction falls under.
Not that that's necessarily a negative thing, it's just important to have a firm grasp of one's initial reason for doing anything.
I've never deleted anything I've put up here. I haven't even touched my Xanga, which extended further back all the way to ten years ago. Not because I'm not embarrassed - the opposite, in fact! - but because it would be a shame to erase such an earnest and genuine resource and time capsule.
I suppose people still have diaries, but the notion of an online diary that is intentionally made available to an audience of infinite hypothetical size would probably get you a few pennies in an early science fiction magazine.
I've sort of stopped writing here, as I changed beyond the sort of person who would derive anything from the thought of someone else reading something I wrote. Growing "up" implies a sort of linear and hierarchical path that only works until you reach maximum bone density. Does a 20 year old grow 'up' into 30? I'm definitely aging. I don't know if I'm maturing. I'm not convinced I've been growing anything lately.
But I have read some good books!
That was the impetus behind this, you see. There's a love of 'year in review' type valedictories, especially for years with as much garbage as this one. I've never been able to do one myself, due to a combination of an inability to remember events as anchored in specific timeframes and a general lack of enough yearly events to make a satisfying read. Also, a lot of the media I experience doesn't come from the year I experienced it in, which sort of defeats the purpose.
But I have read some good books.
Here are some of the ones I read this year, in no particular order.
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
The Sparrow is a story about the discovery of intelligent alien life and what happens when we make first contact. The fact that I can sum that up in a single sentence is as staggeringly remarkable as it is misleading and uninformative. The Sparrow is a story about humanity, and God, and family, and God, and discovery, and God. I learned a lot about the Jesuits, who as far as religious societies go are pretty alright. I have a negative view about proselytizing and missionaries in general, I think it's disingenuous to offer aid with the caveat of conversion. But I also understand it comes from compassion, and has fascinating history. As a book, The Sparrow is engaging, and is told well. As a science fiction novel, it is exceedingly successful - at creating a multifaceted alien society, at realistic space travel, at conveying a sense of otherworldly wonder. It is also very hard to get through at some points, from an emotional standpoint. If I felt qualified to dispense trigger warnings, this book would get a whole lot of them.
Children of God - Mary Doria Russell
Children of God is the sequel to The Sparrow, which I am unsure needed a sequel or not. You would think reading it would give me a better opinion, but I remain unsure. It's a direct and immediate sequel to the above story, so everything said so far applies. It is a perfect counterpart to the initial discovery/miracle themes of the first book in that it is focused much more on the aftermath/revolution. I would say it is required if you liked the first book. It has more flaws but also a much grander scope then the first. The conclusions are satisfyingly, unpleasantly true to life.
The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
This book is also about the discovery of intelligent alien life and what happens. I did not plan this, but apparently that is the sort of book that gets Hugo nominations. This book is tremendously, immensely popular in its native China. It is the first in a trilogy, and despite an excellent, thorough, and helpfully annotated translation this book is fucking incomprehensible to my western-ass mind. It plot is fascinating but split into a million pieces. Things that I suspect are supposed to read like big reveals come across in the most unexpected places. Things I was fascinated by go unexplained, while boring minutiae get center stage. The final third of this book is bonkers bananas and I read the wikipedia summaries for the next two books and I STILL don't know what is going on. A very conflicting book.
The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Addison is the penname of Sarah Monette, who apparently decided to publish in the same genre she works in normally under another name just to see if she could. Which is some baller shit, since it got showered in awards anyway. The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy story about a young man unfortunately becoming emperor and having to deal with it. I really infrequently go full on court-drama-intrigue in my book choice, but this story remained engaging and satisfying despite being 100% about elf politics. The book deals with race, shitty families, aristocracies, and what it means to rule. Also it keeps dropping these unexplained fantasy bombs that hint at this insanely detailed fleshed out elf and goblin populated steampunk ass world that aren't followed up on, which is my jam. I love it when authors are confident enough to not explain every fantasy aspect of their universes. This book was really good.
The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season is about a fantasy world where earthbending is real and the planet is inimical to life sometimes. It is also about loss, society, power structures, gender, and what happens when things fall apart. This book is one of the most well written and captivating stories I have read in a very long time, and if I was pressed would suggest this book above all others for 2017's capstone. The world is perfect in its creation and expression. The magic system is CHOICE. It is 100% emoji FIRE crying laughing face emoji. It is so good. Apparently it is the first book in a series and I am very glad of that fact. Several times while reading the book, I became acutely glad that this book that I was reading had been written, and was received with acclaim. I am glad that books like this are being written, because these are the sort of books that needed and need to be written and read by people growing up. Let this be the new face of science fiction and fantasy going forward, PLEASE.
Read this fucking book.
The Golem and the Jinni - Helene WreckerMy mom clued me into this book, and for that I thank her. The Golem and the Jinni is a book about a golem and a jinni and their lives in turn of the 19th century New York. That's it, that's the book. It is about the Old World and the New World and being human and not being human and trying to survive and maintain vital connections. The fantasy elements are super solid. Also, it's just straight up neat sometimes to read about life for these displaced peoples in this great big melting pot we call big-A-America.The characters are engaging and well defined and elicit compassion. A necessary trait in these trying times. Another book we should make sure the next generation has the opportunity to read if they choose.
Embassytown - China Mieville
Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a book I hold in a special place for stories that are fascinating, alien, and are guaranteed to emotionally destroy me. On the rare occasion I recommend them to a friend it comes with a hefty warning that this book will fuck you up, and fuck your dreams up.
His other books are hit and miss, and his writing has a tendency to really crawl up its own asshole but if you're cognizant of it you can avoid getting sucked in.
I'm actually about halfway through Embassytown right now, but it's definitely got that characteristic Mieville flavor. Aliens, cities, using ancient words casually and like weapons, the deconstruction and deification of language, the vices of civilization, all wrapped up in incomprehensibly dense and chewy worldbuilding. I'm reserving judgement until I reach the end, but I felt I should include it in this list.
The last and largest book, or series of books, requires some explanation.
I was told to investigate an author, C. J. Cherryh, on the promise of wizardry and cool fantasy shit.
Due to a twist in fate that I haven't experienced since the early P2P era, the copy of the book I read was not in fact a book about sweet Slavic fantasy wizard shit.
It was about a space station and crisis and the fragmentation of humanity once we get out there in the dark.
Downbelow Station - C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow drops you off in a world that is already fully defined, and it's your job to figure shit out.
Downbelow is a book about a space station orbiting the first sentient alien world we find, and its handling of a sudden influx of refugees fleeing conflict halfway across the universe. The aliens are basically an afterthought to the somehow far more fascinating huge cast of characters trying to survive in this incredibly detailed, science fiction embedded super shitty environment. These grand sci-fi epics have a very specific flavor they carry, that is simultaneous appreciation and wonderment at the sheer SCOPE of the world this author has made. Shit like Dune and Foundation elicit a sense of something incomprehensibly vast and detailed, something you can't imagine a human being pulling out of their head. The fact that it's a compelling story is almost a delightful, unnecessary surprise to the creation of this world.
And indeed, Downbelow was simply the first gateway into Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe.
I read eleven books in this universe in the span of about a month and a half, in a disgusting display of gluttony for more radical space shit.
These are high class, early 80's science fiction novels about life on space stations, life on planets so far removed from old Earth that they're practically alien, life on planets where human and alien create something new, life on spaceships that fling themselves through rips in reality so violently that if you were conscious during the transition you'd lose your fucking mind.
Every single book is different and unique and adds something to the world, and they span a dizzying number of sub genres.
Cyteen is amazing and probably the best. Finity's End is actually the best, nevermind.
Forty Thouasnd in Gehenna is as bold an attempt as Asmiov's Foundation in terms of zipping wildly through generations of storylines at the turn of a chapter. Merchanter's Luck and Rimrunners are simultaneously light, action driven and full of heavy-ass shit, my dude.
The Alliance-Union universe is some of the best science fiction that I know of, man.
I read a bunch of other books this year, some by the same authors listed above, but as far as ones that carried enough weight to punch through me and onto this list, this is a satisfying amount.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
I think the most freeing aspect of writing is that, unlike spoken conversations, I am confident in knowing that nobody has ever had my writing pushed on them against their will.
The mechanism of how things work is my version of the ultimate truth of the universe.
That was not the sentence I intended to write at this time and it derails us somewhat but I'm going to roll with it as it is essentially true.
When people ask "why" something happened, they very frequently don't mean 'for what reason...', they mean 'by what mechanism...'?
This is an important distinction that is not touched upon nearly often enough. Middle school classes on journalism and writing in general always highlight the importance of 'who what when where why and how' and then go on to emphasize the superiority of WHY above all others.
Nonsense. Why is subjective. How is not. Mostly.
This is why the platitude "things happen for a reason" is utterly devoid of significance. It is tautological, it is self evident. The reason things happen is that other things have happened, since the beginning of things happening. That's the definition of causality, is "stuff makes stuff happen and happens because of other stuff", and it's impossible to have any sort of conversation about the subject without rapidly disappearing up your own asshole.
Why is mostly an unanswerable question. You can answer it however suits you.
How, on the other hand, is the ultimate question. It's typically got one answer, which is the end all be all answer, since reality has a sort of singular aspect to it. There's usually only one way any one thing 'is', and that's an existing point of....existence itself that can be measured and, if not understood, at least perceived and acknowledged by us.
It exists outside of us, essentially. All answers to "Why" comes from within, and therefore have less meaning slash empirical value than "How" answers, since those are not connected to our ability to perceive them.
This strikes me as a statement that someone like the Dalai Lama would probably be dissatisfied with, and I feel a little bad for disappointing him.
What I mean is, human consciousness (another subject in which one is utterly unable to discuss without getting just deep up your own butthole, and if you see anyone try to do so without freely admitting this then your date is going to go very poorly indeed) is impermanent and not omniscient. To the best of our knowledge. I guess this is sort of a hot button issue, actually. Maybe later on it changes and our entire perception of things is an early larval stage to something bigger (oh no it's beginning I can feel the inexorable pull of my own ass) but as it stands right now, humanity is not one with the cosmos.
That is to say, my self that exists is only a very small, closed system in a greater part of existence, yeah? If my ice cream cone falls and I am sad, that is specific to my loop. The sadness I feel, the emotions and perceptions of the event, are individual and constructed by and therefore only have 'meaning' within my own system.
Yet the ice cream falls, regardless. The ice cream exists, regardless. The ice cream has meaning only to a small subset of the universe (see: re: me), but the ice cream has mechanism to the entire universe.
This is about as profound an idea as I am capable of thinking. If I had to start a religion, if I had to boil down my personal spiritual beliefs down to a single concept, which is as impossible as it is frequently attempted by those who are stoned out of their gourds, it would be that statement.
Some things exist in a larger system than others.
A tremendous amount of things (literally every aspect of human consciousness, for an appetizer) exist entirely within our own brainspaces, by definition. Because of this, they are wildly disputable and insanely complicated and impossible to talk about using concrete terms.
This is known as 'philosophy' and it is the domain of those who crawl up their own asses willingly, for personal fulfillment or as a profession.
An even more tremendous amount of things (literally everything else in the universe, for the main course) exist whether we do or not. They are not dependent on us being, to be. They are not our subroutines. They are the phenomena of the universe, and they are simultaneously the simplest and the most complicated things we can possibly hope to interact with/begin to understand/investigate in the universe.
So much of the human condition is wondering, searching for 'something more', 'something out there', searching for reason for our existence, searching for answers of what lies beyond the boundaries of our existence.
What is more concrete and comforting than the realization that there are things that are apart from us, that exist independently of our existence and will continue to do so regardless of anything we could possibly conceivably do!
Dissect the tenants of religion. What purer ideal is there? What highest truth, what more meaningful pursuit is there, than the mechanism of how things Thing at all?
This is what keeps me up at night. The idea that there is a fundamental how of things. I've never understood 'why' as a troubling question compared to 'how' when it comes to really sleepless gnawing issues.
Listen: "Why does a rock exist?" It's meaningless! It doesn't carry any intrinsic meaning! Could people write dissertations on it anyway? Could people ascribe meaning to it? Of course! That's what being human is!
But "How does a rock exist?" has an answer regardless of whether we ask it or not.
That's the root. One has an answer that we have to make up, and one has an answer we have to find. It's there already. It exists. It will wait.
That was not the sentence I intended to write at this time and it derails us somewhat but I'm going to roll with it as it is essentially true.
When people ask "why" something happened, they very frequently don't mean 'for what reason...', they mean 'by what mechanism...'?
This is an important distinction that is not touched upon nearly often enough. Middle school classes on journalism and writing in general always highlight the importance of 'who what when where why and how' and then go on to emphasize the superiority of WHY above all others.
Nonsense. Why is subjective. How is not. Mostly.
This is why the platitude "things happen for a reason" is utterly devoid of significance. It is tautological, it is self evident. The reason things happen is that other things have happened, since the beginning of things happening. That's the definition of causality, is "stuff makes stuff happen and happens because of other stuff", and it's impossible to have any sort of conversation about the subject without rapidly disappearing up your own asshole.
Why is mostly an unanswerable question. You can answer it however suits you.
How, on the other hand, is the ultimate question. It's typically got one answer, which is the end all be all answer, since reality has a sort of singular aspect to it. There's usually only one way any one thing 'is', and that's an existing point of....existence itself that can be measured and, if not understood, at least perceived and acknowledged by us.
It exists outside of us, essentially. All answers to "Why" comes from within, and therefore have less meaning slash empirical value than "How" answers, since those are not connected to our ability to perceive them.
This strikes me as a statement that someone like the Dalai Lama would probably be dissatisfied with, and I feel a little bad for disappointing him.
What I mean is, human consciousness (another subject in which one is utterly unable to discuss without getting just deep up your own butthole, and if you see anyone try to do so without freely admitting this then your date is going to go very poorly indeed) is impermanent and not omniscient. To the best of our knowledge. I guess this is sort of a hot button issue, actually. Maybe later on it changes and our entire perception of things is an early larval stage to something bigger (oh no it's beginning I can feel the inexorable pull of my own ass) but as it stands right now, humanity is not one with the cosmos.
That is to say, my self that exists is only a very small, closed system in a greater part of existence, yeah? If my ice cream cone falls and I am sad, that is specific to my loop. The sadness I feel, the emotions and perceptions of the event, are individual and constructed by and therefore only have 'meaning' within my own system.
Yet the ice cream falls, regardless. The ice cream exists, regardless. The ice cream has meaning only to a small subset of the universe (see: re: me), but the ice cream has mechanism to the entire universe.
This is about as profound an idea as I am capable of thinking. If I had to start a religion, if I had to boil down my personal spiritual beliefs down to a single concept, which is as impossible as it is frequently attempted by those who are stoned out of their gourds, it would be that statement.
Some things exist in a larger system than others.
A tremendous amount of things (literally every aspect of human consciousness, for an appetizer) exist entirely within our own brainspaces, by definition. Because of this, they are wildly disputable and insanely complicated and impossible to talk about using concrete terms.
This is known as 'philosophy' and it is the domain of those who crawl up their own asses willingly, for personal fulfillment or as a profession.
An even more tremendous amount of things (literally everything else in the universe, for the main course) exist whether we do or not. They are not dependent on us being, to be. They are not our subroutines. They are the phenomena of the universe, and they are simultaneously the simplest and the most complicated things we can possibly hope to interact with/begin to understand/investigate in the universe.
So much of the human condition is wondering, searching for 'something more', 'something out there', searching for reason for our existence, searching for answers of what lies beyond the boundaries of our existence.
What is more concrete and comforting than the realization that there are things that are apart from us, that exist independently of our existence and will continue to do so regardless of anything we could possibly conceivably do!
Dissect the tenants of religion. What purer ideal is there? What highest truth, what more meaningful pursuit is there, than the mechanism of how things Thing at all?
This is what keeps me up at night. The idea that there is a fundamental how of things. I've never understood 'why' as a troubling question compared to 'how' when it comes to really sleepless gnawing issues.
Listen: "Why does a rock exist?" It's meaningless! It doesn't carry any intrinsic meaning! Could people write dissertations on it anyway? Could people ascribe meaning to it? Of course! That's what being human is!
But "How does a rock exist?" has an answer regardless of whether we ask it or not.
That's the root. One has an answer that we have to make up, and one has an answer we have to find. It's there already. It exists. It will wait.
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