Films of 2012
I’ve decided that, since I can’t find a convenient film-version of Goodreads, I will keep a tally on the blog here – over on the right, if you’re reading this on the blog itself; if you’re getting this through RSS or email, and you care, you’ll have to visit. Anyway so far there are two movies there: Frost/Nixon, which I’ve been meaning to watch for ages, finally saw yesterday, and really enjoyed – what a cast! – and Chronicles of Riddick, which I love despite its flaws.
Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree Jr: a remarkable life
It’s probably impossible for me to give an adequate review of this amazing biography. It is written so beautifully, and Sheldon/Tiptree’s life so extraordinary, that it’s hard to encapsulate in anything other than this book.
For those late to the party: Alice Sheldon wrote SF as James Tiptree Jr and remained incognito for many years. This biography sets out Sheldon’s entire life, though, not just the fiction-writing part, because it is truly a life worth recording. She went to Africa three times, with her parents, before the age of 15 – one time on a gorilla-hunting expedition. Life at home was no fairy tale… and she got married at 19 to a man she had only met a few times. They stayed together for about 6 years. She tried university, she tried being an artist, she tried journalism. She joined the WAC during WW2 and thus met her second husband, Ting. She got a doctorate in psychology, she tried chicken farming, and – the reason most people will read this bio – she wrote science fiction, mostly in short story form. She was a complex woman, probably a difficult one, beset by a number of demons – how to deal with emotions, her mother, depression, anger, and drug use. I’m not convinced I would have liked her as a person. That’s beside the point, though.
This is not a happy story. There is a lot of heartbreak and difficulty in Sheldon’s life, on large and small scales. Phillips’ discussion of her depression and drug use is sympathetic: not so delicate as to ignore it, not romanticising it or making excuses, just… this is how it was. Which was heartbreaking, to be honest. The way Sheldon herself wrote about her feelings and frustrations was agonising, perhaps because, frankly, it was (for me) just faintly recognisable.
One thing I really liked about this biography is Phillips’ use of names. She calls her subject Alice early on, and Alli after Ting’s mother starts using that nickname (she loved it apparently). She also uses Tiptree when referring to the fiction and letters and possible thoughts of that alter-ego, which I think is a lovely way of complicating what could otherwise be dismissed as ‘simply’ a nom-de-plume. (Phillips also devotes some time to Raccoona Sheldon, and how Tiptree and Raccoona were seen to interact by editors etc.) It’s a true history book too: Phillips has used a lot of primary material, and – delightfully – quotes from it frequently. This worked really well, and was utterly riveting, when it came to Tiptree’s letter writing. Tiptree was an inveterate letter-writer; fan letters, letters accompanying stories, the occasional letter to a magazine… Tiptree was a regular correspondent of a huge number of people, and by regular that might be a letter every fortnight or so. And the people? Oh, Ursula le Guin and Joanna Russ, for example. (My head exploded a little bit at the idea of those three exchanging letters and talking about each other to the other. Which they did.) Yes, it did inspire me to write a fan letter to Julie Phillips.
I am not of the opinion that one must know the gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and schooling history of an author in order to understand or appreciate their work as a piece of art. There is, however, no denying that some background or knowledge can add depth. Knowing Tiptree to be a woman does change how we read some of his/her fiction; and knowing something of her struggle with sexuality and sex can add depth, too, as well as her experiences of colonialism in Africa an Europe after WW2.
These comments haven’t even touched on Sheldon’s sexuality, her politics, or any number of other issues in her life. It’s a really, really great biography – even if you’re not interested in Tiptree’s fiction, this is a remarkable life, and illuminates all sorts of interesting things about life in one part of America from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Perchance to Dream of theatres and adventure
A delightful read, although not as good as the first in the series, Eyes Like Stars. (This discussion contains some spoilers for that book.)
Having discovered who her mother is and wanting to rescue Nate, who might be the love of her life and has been kidnapped by the Sea Goddess Sedna, Beatrice Shakespeare Smith – Bertie – sets out into the world with four miscreant fairies and one devious air-elemental. And this is where one really big difference between the first and second books occurs: the setting. Where the casual magic of the Theatre Illuminata kind of made sense because it’s a theatre, and it seems to occupy a space not really connected to a particular time or space, the ‘real’ world is meant to be just that. So the magic of Bertie’s words, and of some of the other characters met along the way, seemed slightly more out of place. Perhaps this is because I was expecting the story to be more grounded in particularity – perhaps Bertie’s ‘real’ (non-theatre) world isn’t meant to be any more ‘my’ real world at all.
That’s maybe a quibble, but it did still sit at the back of my mind gnawing a bit. There were a couple of other things that gnawed, including Bertie’s relationship with and attitude towards both Nate and Ariel. I’m not a fan of the love triangle at the best of times, and this one made me uncomfortable because I couldn’t tell which one I thought she would, or should, end up with! Perhaps silly, but there you go. I also occasionally had difficulty telling whether something was actually happening to Bertie in the real world, or whether it was a dream, or if it was happening for real but in an other place. It may well be that Mantchev was blurring boundaries deliberately, but I found that this confusion threw me out of the story occasionally.
Nonetheless, I did enjoy this novel. Mantchev has a delightful turn of phrase and it’s fast-moving enough that I basically read it in a sitting (helps that I am on holidays). Bertie continues to be an enjoyable and engaging heroine, who develops by necessity as she encounters difficulties and as she considers the holds that people have on her, and how to be her own person. The fairies are still winsome and incorrigible, and have renewed my own interest in pie. Ariel… continues to be problematic. I don’t especially like The Tempest, but should I ever bother to see it again I will certainly have difficulty viewing him without Mantchev-glasses (I will also suffer from Dan-Simmons-glasses when watching Caliban, so maybe I really ought not to see it again. Oh so sad). The plot, as I said, was fast-moving and had some fun bits, but I think suffers with comparison to the first book. That was so tight, and focussed around one really core issue, that it felt utterly of a piece. Here, although rescuing Nate is central, the action feels more episodic and bound together much more loosely.
I’m intrigued that there is a third (and, I think, final) book in the series; it will be very interesting to see where Mantchev takes Bertie et al next.
Monster chunks
I was going to mix n match their feet and bodies, to have different colours – which I think is what Rebecca Danger does – but J voted for matched, so here they are… sans faces…
… and with faces.
We decided that different expressions were the way to go, too.
These little cuties are for a one-year-old whose existence I learned of on about her birthday. She is the daughter of a woman who was an exchange student in my home many, many years ago with whom my mum and I have stayed in occasional contact. It sounds like the pregnancy was quite traumatic, but the picture we received of the girl today is adorable so hopefully it has turned out for the best, and will continue to do so!
Twilight Robbery: the new(ish) Frances Hardinge novel
Reading Frances Hardinge is all about Saracen, for me. Saracen the evil-eyed bully-boy goose.
Of course, there is also Mosca, his owner. This is a world where so many little gods – the Beloved – are worshipped that rather than having their own day, the Beloved have certain hours of a day devoted to them; being born in a Beloved’s time determines your name and, in people’s eyes, your very nature. Mosca was born at the time of Palpitattle, He Who Keeps Flies out of Jam and Butterchurns – Lord of the Flies, if you will. It is an inauspicious name, to say the least, and Mosca’s fierce black eyes and equally fierce temper, and occasional propensity for playing fast and loose with the strict letter of the law, do not help her case. Nor does her ownership and protectiveness of a certain winged warrior. She is wonderful.
There’s also Eponymous Clent, Mosca’s… well. Friend? Protector? She wouldn’t like either of those terms. Co-conspirator, perhaps; ally, usually. Swindler, con-man, runner-away-from-debts and hater of Saracen, Eponymous can usually be relied on to talk his and Mosca’s way out of the trouble that he or she has managed to talk them into. Except at the beginning of this story, where he is in a debtor’s prison and for some reason the town doesn’t seem willing to accept poetry in lieu of actual currency.
Saracen plays a small, though vital, part in the story, just as he did in the preceding novel, Fly By Night – one of my favourite YA books. This time, despite the important role Mosca and Eponymous played in Mandelion, they find themselves once again on the road with little coin for bread or board. Deciding to head for the other side of the river, they find themselves in Toll, a town which prides itself on having the only real bridge across the Langfeather. As with many towns with such a precious commodity and monopoly, Toll is pretty smug. It’s also really, really weird, with some serious discrepancies between Toll-by-Day and Toll-by-Night, which of course Mosca and Eponymous and Saracen end up finding out all about. They just can’t seem to help themselves; start off with a good con or maybe a chance at a reward, ending up uncovering all sorts of interesting things that all sorts of interesting people would prefer to keep covered, thanks all the same, and can I roast your goose?
Hardinge has a wonderful way with words, and is a deft hand at descriptive prose; she’s created a really interesting world here. It’s a fantasy insofar as it’s not our she’s writing about; but at the same time there it’s not magical, nor steampunk. It’s just a world maybe on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, quite comfortable in itself as a rule even if most cities and provinces aren’t entirely sure who should be ruling them. I really hope there is more Mosca Mye to come.
Changing Planes: a Le Guin collection
I am a big fan of le Guin, but this is definitely not a favourite collection. It’s amusing, but it’s not excellent (for me, anyway).
The conceit behind the collection I did really like: the idea that the boredom of sitting in an airport could trigger a visit to – wait for it – a different plane, as in of existence. It seems to be that the body itself does the travelling, because people come back with presents and sometimes arrive back on their own plane upside down. This is quite a fun take on the idea of alternate realities, since I think the idea also is that all of these planes are variations on Earth.
Each story in this collection is set in, or describes, a different plane, and many of them have little actual plot. It’s more like a travelogue, which makes sense and perhaps accounts for my less-than-in-love reaction. Some of them are very clever; some of them are quite clearly making a specific point about contemporary ideas, technology, or issues, or are presenting a topsy-turvy view to challenge and confront the reader. So there’s a plane where almost everyone is royalty; one where after about the age of 7, hardly anyone speaks; and one where people share their neighbours’ dreams. There’s a plane where two major cities fought for decades over a couple of acres of riverside property, and one where developing wings is a disability to be pitied. On another plane a scientific experiment attempted to develop children with no need of sleep, raising questions of the necessity of consciousness and sleep for sentience, and another where violence is a way of life.
I guess I expect le Guin to always turn out serious, hard-hitting and difficult fiction, which this is – largely – not. It’s a bit unreasonable of me, but there you go; I don’t expect light-hearted from her! It is a delightful collection, though, and of course all of the stories are very well written and there are some totally delightful descriptions.
Boxing Day Super Mega Podcast #2
Stolen largely from Jonathan:
The day after Christmas is a special one, dedicated to winding down after a day of feasting and gift giving, laughter and merriment. Things slow down – unless you have a taste for the mega-discount sales – and people tend to relax with family.
This Boxing Day, a bunch of participants in Australian podcasting joined together to record The Second Annual Boxing Day Super Mega Podcast. Participating were:
- Alex, Alisa, and Tansy from Galactic Suburbia;
- Ian and Kirstyn from The Writer and the Critic; and
- Gary and Jonathan from The Coode St Podcast.
Sadly, Grant from Bad Film Diaries couldn’t make it.
What we ended up with was seven seven people talking, in a fairly organised manner, about their highlights of 2011 and what they’re looking forward to in 2012. Because I [Jonathan] was doing the engineering for this there was a stuff up and the first 20 minutes of the podcast were lost forever. Alex and I did a quick do-over and new intro which we think works pretty well. Either way, we all hope you enjoy it, and that you check out our individual podcasts which will be coming out in the next weeks and months.
You can listen to the recording here, or stream it from iTunes via The Coode St Podcast.
The lottery: Catherynne Valente’s Omikuji Project
Oh my goodness I loved this collection so much.
I’ve had a hit and miss record with Valente over the last few years. The novel Palimpsest did absolutely nothing for me – I found it impossible to get into and the premise didn’t interest me that much either. I could, though, appreciate the beauty of her language, which made it perhaps more frustrating not to enjoy it as a piece of writing. I’ve liked her short stories more, although again not all of them – there have been a few which frustrated me, a couple because I think they were trying too hard and a couple of others because I just didn’t GET what she was trying to do.
And then there’s this collection.
I signed up for the Omikuji Project recently, because I found out about it when Valente was considering shutting it down for having too few subscribers. The deal is, you pay a certain amount and you get a short story – written just for the subscribers – every month, on beautiful paper with an envelope sealed with wax (apparently; haven’t got my first one yet). This collection is the first two years’ worth of those stories, made available via Lulu, and I figured I would buy it to have nearly the full set.
Many of these stories are riffs on fairy stories, which can be a dangerous thing to approach, but I don’t think Valente hits a bum note with any of them.
I would normally just talk about my favourites in a collection, but I feel like I want to mention every single one of them… so the TL; DR version is just: it’s beautiful. Well worth getting from Lulu.
“The Glass Gear” is a delightful, wistful and bittersweet spin on Cinderella, while the three parts of “A Hole to China” are about a child who attempts to dig just that, and what she discovers at the centre of the earth (hint: not what you were expecting. Whatever you were expecting, not that). “The Kunstkammer of Dr Ampersand” is a travel guide explaining a curio cabinet and OH I WANT that novel! Love triangles, heart-of-darkness experiences… it would be poignant and beautiful, like the cabinet. “How to Build a Ladder to the Sun in Six Simple Steps” takes the idea of planetary spheres of influence in intriguing directions, while “The Pine Witch Counts her Knuckle Bones” takes the idea of natural witchcraft and makes it… greener. Valente gets vicious on Chaucer and Boccaccio with “The Legend of Good Women,” and although I’ve not read all of either of the male-authored accounts I know exactly what she is stabbing at here, and she does it well. “Mullein” is one of the most poignant of the collection, a rather heart-breaking little story about the lengths someone might go to for love, and the reader is definitely left wondering whether it’s worth it or not (although I don’t think the characters are). “That Which lets the Light In” is probably my least favourite, perhaps because I am not as familiar with the Russian stories that she is playing with. A story, or set of stories, I am more familiar with feature in ” A Postcard from the End of the World,” which combines Norse and Greek myths into a homely little story about apples (kind of), and “How to raise a Minotaur” sees your Cretan labyrinth, picks it apart, and puts it back together again with added nuance, contemporaneity and a little bit more hope. “The Economy of Clouds” reverses the traditional perspective of Jack and the Beanstalk; “The Still” is a slightly creepy story about girls and plums. I adored “The Wedding” – the idea of the mismatched couple, or mismatched families, is a banal staple of romantic comedies but this – a human and a rime giant? Delightful. “Reading Borges in Buenos Aires” reminded me that I have been meaning to read more Borges – I’ve only read one collection, and that many years ago – and it also connected in a weird way to The Dervish House, because of its ideas of cities as books with social geography that can be read. “The Folklore of Sleep” didn’t work particularly for me, although I appreciated what she was doing both with the idea of sleep as fundamental but more deeply with the idea of what makes individuals and how others react to that. I think the only clearly SF story in the collection is “Oh, the Snow-Bound Earth, the Golden Moon,” and it would make a wonderful novel too: children and an abandoned lunar colony, where they’re all given lunar names and don’t understand the Earth. Two of the stories in the collection are actually first chapters of novels finished over this period, from Deathless and The Habitation of the Blessed. As a result of reading them here, I must read the former and will be avoiding the latter studiously (which I already guessed based on their blurbs). I only understood the title of “The Opposite of Mary” as I was looking back over it today, and that because last week at church the sermon was about Mary’s response to the annunciation. In this story, there is no announcement of imminent divine arrival, but rather just a divine presence… in the shed, with the tools. And the human interaction is humanly motivated. It’s quite an interesting take, for me, on the idea of such interactions. Valente apparently wrote “Blue with those Tears” almost as a challenge to herself because she loathes other stories of Atlanteans so much – and in typical Valente fashion she cannot leave the idea unproblematised. “The Consultant” was inspired by a friend suggesting the need for a fairy tale consultant, and showcases Valente’s depth of knowledge about the subject. And finally, “Grandmother Euphrosyne” is a wonderful, slightly cranky story – just like a grandmother – that brings in Greek myth and family relationships in a beautiful, beautiful way.
The last thing to say about this collection is that aside from the glorious prose, there are pictures to go with every story – which I believe are largely from the community of Omikuji recipients (can’t wait to join them!), and also the beginning of the letters that Valente sends with each story, which contribute to the larger meta-narrative. This is a really special set of stories.
Spoilerific book club: YARN
In this, episode 49 of Galactic Suburbia, we have a spoilerific one for you. This time we’re tackling Yarn, by Jon Armstrong. It is totally full of spoilers. Please only listen to this podcast if you’ve read the book, plan never to read the book, or really and truly don’t mind spoilers. You can get it from iTunes or download/stream from Galactic Suburbia.Characters:Tane
Vada
Kira
Pilla
M-Bunny
Authors & books mentioned:
Janet Catherine Berlo – Quilting Lessons – Notes from the Scrapbook of a Writer & Quilter
Jennifer Chiaverini
The Friday Night Knitting Club novels – Kate JacobsAlso, GREY (the not-prequel set in the same world) is up for grabs – comment with your thoughts on YARN and I’ll choose a random winner.
Bad Power is so good
This fourth in the Twelve Planets series, from Alisa at Twelfth Planet Press, comes back to the idea presented by the first collection – that of an interconnected suite of stories, which build on and enhance one another but also stand by themselves. I think this comes second only to Love and Romanpunk for me, so far, and as I’ve already discussed, I’m in no way unbiased about that delightful little book.
The overarching idea here in Deborah Biancotti’s set is, as the title suggests, the use and abuse of power – especially when it is given to ordinary, or even undeserving people. The blurb asks “Hate superheroes? Yeah. They probably hate you, too.” It feels to me that the idea of ordinary people having powers and struggling with them is something that’s only become interesting in the last few years. Biancotti does not present unreservedly heroic or villainous people, in general, here. They do some stupid things… but they’re not out for world domination. They do some heroic things… but they have their struggles and failures, too.
The first story is “Shades of Grey,” in which Esser Grey confronts the idea of immortality and finds it not really to his liking. His reasons for not liking it involve some intriguing of character development, and the consequences should be ruinous for him but mostly end up being so for other people around him instead. I don’t think you can like Grey, exactly, but his story is an excellent introduction to the issues of power as Biancotti imagines them. And we are also introduced to the wonderful Detective Palmer, who keeps popping up throughout the rest of the sequence. Like in the second story.
“Palming the Lady” might be my favourite of the set. Not that it’s a pleasant story, by any stretch of the imagination. There’s a somewhat spoilt rich boy, son of a famous father, who claims to being stalked by a homeless woman; Detective Palmer, newly in the bad books at work, is assigned to look into it. Which means talking to said homeless woman at much closer quarters than she is comfortable with, and finding out more information than she is comfortable with. The ‘stalker’ is confronting on a number of levels: for her appearance, and her (lack of) status, and her talent. And for the conjunction, too, of a remarkable talent in an unremarkable woman. I did not like the rich boy, Matthew, but fortunately most of the story is actually about Palmer, who shows delightful tenacity as well as an endearing capacity for not understanding things immediately. Also, a weary love of humanity.
My dislike of Matthew made me slightly wary of “Web of Lies,” the third story, because it features him again. Fortunately, this is quite a different story, and quite a different Matthew too. It begins at his father’s funeral an unspecified amount of time after the second story,and – appropriately – features his mother to a much greater extent than “Palming the Lady.” There, Palmer met her once and dismissed her as having “a prescription problem.” This story delves into her life and shows it to be about far more than simply a bored housewife and overuse of valium. This one creeped me out quite a lot; somewhat sinister mothers will do that. Matthew is theoretically the centre of the story, with his problems in understanding the power that he is coming into, but the mother is where my interest really lay.
The fourth story is quite different, and it took me a while – in fact, until reading the next story – before I really understood how “Bad Power” really fit into the suite. I think it works overall, but certainly when I first started it I was a bit confused. Partly this is the difference in narrative voice: where the first three are third-person, modern Australia, and set in wealthy enough areas, this one is first-person, somewhere ill-defined, and very definitely not well-educated. It’s an unpleasant story (again). In this case the unpleasantness comes about because of other people’s reactions to our narrator’s power, which haven’t been explored on a medium-to-large scale in any of the other stories. And it definitely provides interesting context about how attitudes towards ‘power’ have changed, as well as attitudes towards individuals and, hmm, maybe social responsibility? After I got into the rhythm of the narrative style this was a really good story.
Exploding the Twelve Planets paradigm, this collection has FIVE stories, finishing off with “Cross That Bridge.” In many ways it ties together aspects of all four of the previous stories in nice, but not too neat, ways – ways that still leave me hungering for more story set in this world, for sure. We’re back with police work, this time with a Detective Ponti (heh, Latin joke!) at the helm, looking for a missing child. This is probably the most hopeful of all of the stories, where power is used largely for good – or at least mostly non-destructive – purposes, and where indeed an actual purpose for the powers exhibited so far can be imagined, and undertaken.
As should be obvious, all of these stories tie together, and I can see the reasoning behind the sequencing. However, I think you could probably read them in any order (hmm, except perhaps #2 and 3, which should be read in sequence) and enjoy the exploration of ideas they present. You could also, crucially, enjoy them completely independently – although I would imagine that that would leave you wanting more, to an even greater extent than I do at the moment. This collection really works.
Randomly Yours, Alex 