Baudolino
I’ve had this on my self as needing to be read for… a long time. I have finally got to it as part of my effort to make a dent in the to-be-read shelf. I read the first couple of pages to see whether I did want to read it, and I did. It opens with Baudolino starting to write his memoir, in a mixture of languages and appalling spelling and with the occasional bit of Latin intruding because Baudolino wasn’t able to scrape it all off the parchment. It’s unclear whether Baudolino is telling the truth … and basically that’s the motif of the entire book.
The entire premise of the book is to explore the ideas of truth and ‘truthiness’ (which I think Stephen Colbert developed) – when does a thing that’s not true become true because it’s been claimed to be true enough times? – and notions of faith, and honesty, and history. And basically it’s a big sprawling story about one man claiming to have connections to a whole bunch of stuff that is generally accepted to have happened in history along with other things that exist in myth and legend. It’s sprawling and epic and quite remarkable. As you would expect from Umberto Eco.
Baudolino is telling his story to a Byzantine man he’s rescued during the Crusaders’ sack of that city; Baudolino isn’t part of the sacking but he looks Frankish enough to be able to get around. He’s telling the story as a way of making sense of his life, searching for the meaning he hopes to see in his experiences. So there’s two narratives going on here, as Baudolino and his friend look to get out of Constantinople, and the story of Baudolino himself. It’s the second, of course, that’s the most interesting bit. His story begins with meeting Frederick Barbarossa and being adopted by him because he, Baudolino, tells such interesting stories and appears to be a good luck charm of sorts. It then progresses through Baudolino going to university in Paris, and then various escapades with Frederick, and eventually going on a mind-boggling journey to find the country of Prester John. Along the way he encounters the story of the Grasal (Grail), meddles in politics, makes and loses friends, nearly dies several times, and is rarely accounted as much of a scoundrel as he actually is.
Note: the fact that this book is translated is remarkable, and the translator – William Weaver – should get more acknowledgement than he does. It’s beautifully written.
Frankenstein
I have now read Frankenstein. I’ve never had the impetus to read it before; I never studied Gothic literature, and it’s just never been bumped up the to-be-read list. But a few weeks ago someone at church read it, and waxed so lyrical in wanting to have a pop-up book club to discuss it (as a sequel to one last year on The Book of Strange New Things) that I agreed… and here we are.
Um, spoilers?
I do not like Victor Frankenstein.
I had a general knowledge of the story – that Victor created the monster, who then implored his creator to create a mate for him, and then the monster killed Victor’s bride. I knew there was something to do with the Arctic but I didn’t know why. So to be honest, I wasn’t really expecting to be particularly surprised by the novel. And in the broad outlines, I wasn’t, but in some of the details I certainly wasn’t.
I had no idea that the story was structured as a story within a story, with Victor relating his tale of woe to Robert as they sat stuck in the ice in the far reaches of the Arctic, who is then relating it by letter back to his own sister. I don’t think that particularly changes the story itself but it’s intriguing to see Shelley using this conceit as the excuse for why, and how, the story is being told – that she wasn’t just writing a third-person omnipotent narrator watching and relating all the events. Instead, this allows Victor to include his passionate remonstrances and remembrances, and for Robert to include his own reflections at beginning and end.
Side note: I would have liked more about Robert. Did he get home? Why was he so passionate about finding what was in the extreme north? I wanted more than just what he told his sister!
And so Victor. Continue reading →
Nemesis Games
Previously, in The Expanse: Leviathan Wakes; Caliban’s War; Abaddon’s Gate; Cibola Burn.
Basically my entire review of this book consists of JAMES COREY YOU ARE TOO MEAN FOR WORDS WHY FOR DID YOU DO THAT?!
Spoilers for the first four. Duh.
The preceding books have mostly focussed on Holden and someone else, or a few other someones, doing important things in the solar system. This time there are four points of view: Holden, Amos, Alex, and Naomi. This should have warned me about what was coming, but somehow my brain refused to process the obvious reason for doing this.
Corey splits up the crew of the Roci.
Splits. Them. Up.
I mean, it was bad enough when half the crew went onto the surface of a planet in the last book. Of course sometimes one or more have gone off on their own individual missions. But never before have the four been pursuing largely separate ends, separate from one another. It was devastating.
Where Cibola was focussed on the early attempts at colonising a new planet through the gate, this is focussed squarely on the repercussions of such colonising for the solar system itself. After all, why bother terraforming a planet when there are planets already ready to be colonised, where you can walk on the surface? Why break your back mining asteroids when there’s minerals on the worlds where you can breathe the air? … but then what happens to those places that had people working on them, who then leave?
It’s kind of an epic version of a gold rush.
Overall this is another excellent, page-turning, enthralling novel and I cannot wait for the sixth (and final, I think) volume.
I have one quibble. Continue reading →
Nightshades
This book was provided to me by the publisher at no cost.
It’s fair to say that I’m not a huge vampire fan. I have read a few vampire books, I’ve seen a few vampire movies, but they’re not automatically my preference. So I acknowledge that I may not be the best judge of a vampire story. But anyway, here I go giving a review of one anyway.
Vampires, in this it’s-tomorrow story, have recently been acknowledged as existing in the real world. But unlike in Gail Carriger’s stories, they’re not making moves as a population group to be accepted by the general human population. In fact it’s not really clear what the purpose of the vampires is as a group. Which is fine, because that’s not Olson’s purpose in writing the story. Instead the story is focussed on two people: one an FBI agent who’s joining the newly created paranormal division, and the other… well, that would be telling.
Alex, the agent, is a ‘legacy agent’ – his mother was a big shot in the Bureau and he’s looking to live up to that. Well, that’s what I got from the start of the story, anyway. It was kind of ignored for the rest of the story, though, and while I can see that neither the story nor the man want people to keep harping on his past it also felt like a part of his character that just went nowhere. Overall, though, he was a competent agent and made some interesting choices.
The other character was more interesting, but I don’t want to say too much about her because that are some nice revelations that are part of the fun of the story.
This story is fast-moving and has some nice character moments. It’s clearly setting up for a sequence of stories about the way humanity reacts to those different from them, and also what consequences predators can have. I’m not sure at this stage whether I’d sign up for the rest of the series, simply because I have so many other books to read and I did not fall completely in love with any of the characters or the setting. But if you’re into vampire stories crossed with police procedural types, then this is probably just your thing.
I also want to note that I read this off the back of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, and that was a REALLY weird back to back experience.
Extra(ordinary) people
Oh Joanna.
Five narratives, loosely connected by brief snatches of conversation between a schoolkid and their tutor on history. Each story different – thematically, stylistically – each story offering different perceptions on humanity and difference and survival.
I’d read “Souls” before – I have it as an Ace double with Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” The Abbess Radegunde is a remarkable woman – highly educated, linguistically talented, devoted to God and her flock of nuns – and then one day the Vikings come a-raiding. And things change, but definitely not in the way the Norsemen were expecting. How can you judge the people around you? What are you willing to sacrifice? How do you know who you are? I love that this story seems like one sort of story and then KAPOW it’s a very different one.
I found “The Mystery of the Young Gentleman” quite hard to come to grips with, and even on reflection it’s still not entirely clear. Partly this stems from language: someone refers to the narrator as an ‘invert’, and I wasn’t entirely clear what that meant although I knew it had insulting sexual/gender overtones; I’m still not clear whether the speaker intended it to mean homosexuality or cross-dressing. In the context, probably either-or. Anyway, the story is written by the titular young man, as a series of letters although we don’t know who the recipient will be. He’s travelling across the Atlantic with a young Spanish girl pretending to be his niece, and there’s a nosy doctor and a few other passengers. Like I said I’m still not entirely sure what was going on here – whether the young man was rescuing a girl like himself, where both of them are like Radegund from the previous story? Maybe. Despite my lack of complete comprehension I did still enjoy the story in a very Russ-type way: it challenges ideas of gender and sex and sexuality and identity and appearance and how much information you need for a story, anyway. Also what sort of stories ought to be read by young women.
“Bodies” goes well into the future and was probably the most opaque of the five stories, for me (possibly not helped by reading while camping, but anwyay…). This is also written as a letter, but this time we know who is being addressed – James – and the writer is reflecting on the time when they met (after he had been pulled from the past/resurrected/ reconstructed) and the immediate aftermath. It’s also concerned with sexuality and gender identity – James has had a bad life because of his, and adjusting to a future where he is actually allowed to be himself is difficult. In some ways I was put in mind of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time in terms of how hard it might be a for a 20th-century mind to cope with something approaching a utopia (especially someone who has been oppressed), because we’re suspicious and guarded.
“What did you do during the revolution, Grandma?” is a bit Greg Egan and a bit Ursula Le Guin and a bit James Tiptree Jr. What if our universe exists on a hypersphere and the point where we happen to exist is the point where cause and effect happen to equal 1? Which means there are other universes where cause and effect does not equal 1… and then what would happen if you could access those other places? What would humans do? … it’s a pretty weird story. I am intrigued by the conceit although I don’t think Russ plays it out as much as she might. Again she goes in for human stories rather than the maths looking at cause and effect in humanity, and love and sex and confusion.
Finally, with “Everyday Depressions”, I nearly cried. It, too, is epistolary – it opens with “Dear Susanillamilla” – and it’s about the letter-writer hashing out the plot and characters for a novel she (I presume) is thinking of writing. The bit that made me cry was when the heroine’s mother is named Alice Tiptree, of the Sheldons of Deepdene. The entire collection opens with a quote from Alice Sheldon:
“I began thinking of you as pnongl. People” – [said the alien] “it’s dreadful, you think a place is just wild and then there’re people – “
I can’t help but see similarities in the way Russ wrote to Alice Sheldon in the style of these letters, and in Sheldon’s letters back. The development of the gothic novel the writer is proposing to write also just makes me ache, in knowing the Russ/Sheldon connections – and also of course Russ’ own discussions about the gothic story. This little story is an absolute gem if you know those connections, and still amusing and lovely even if you don’t.
Oh, Joanna.
The Dark Labyrinth
You know that thing where because you read so much of one genre, you keep expecting non-genre books to follow the same conventions?
That.
I know the Durrell family from having read My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell at school, and then reading several more of his memoirs off my own bat. It’s quite funny to realise that the moody older brother Gerald remembers turned into, apparently, quite a well-known author.
I think I took this off my parents’ bookshelves many years ago and I’ve never got around to reading it. I have finally done so as part of a concerted effort to get through my to-be-read pile, which I started… last week.
This was published in 1947 (my copy is from 1969). I kind of feel like I need to better understand post-war Britain before making claims about this novel… but actually that’s not the case. Certainly I think Durrell is making some pretty specific comments on British society of the time; but he’s also making comments about humanity more generally that are still applicable today.
The story: a bunch of random people, some with tenuous connections and other not, come together to go explore a labyrinth on Crete as a day-trip from their Mediterranean cruise. The first chapter is written in the aftermath, so we know right from the start that there’s been an accident and some people haven’t survived – I was surprised to see this narrative technique in a box written 70 years ago, to be honest, and was quite confused initially (it’s one of the aspects I now love about it). The rest of the novel gives some background to most of the characters, and then details their experiences within the labyrinth.
I should stop here and say I really loved this book. Occasionally the style made me impatient – some sentences were a bit too opaque for my tastes, and I couldn’t quite figure out whether Durrell is being serious in his misogyny or whether he’s being ironic, since I think both options are equally plausible. But this book is staying on my bookshelf, since I can well imagine rereading it (also my mum might be sad if I ditched it).
Durrell himself said the novel was
really an extended morality but written artlessly in the style of a detective story. Guilt, superstition, The Good Life, all appear as ordinary people; a soldier on leave, a medium, an elderly married couple (Trueman), a young unfledged pair, a missionary…
(in a letter to Henry Miller). The variety of characters – yes, many of them tropes – is of course what allows him to explore different attitudes and ideas and problems. The main character, or at least one of two who gets the most airtime, is a mediocre poet-cum-wannabe-critic who has just been drifting for years. Born to some money, never really had the inclination to hold down a job or be properly the starving artist in the garret; not great to his wife; and so on. In contrast, the other character with the most time is Baird, who has come to Crete to try and lay some demons to rest – the difference between the two men is stark. The other single men of the group – the medium mentioned above and an arrogant artist – provide some colour. There are two women: the missionary, who is severe and generally angry and disapproving, and an uneducated young woman trying to better herself. The “elderly” married couple – and it hadn’t even occurred to me that their name is Truman! – are really a package deal throughout the novel and may be my favourite part of the whole story. Certainly their eventual story is the most captivating. They are generally looked down upon by the artists and “better bred” members of the group (they won the opportunity to go first-class on the cruise) but there are simply wonderful moments that make them incredibly real. Like someone walking past their room one night and hearing her crying, and him saying “There, Elsie… I know things would have been different if it hadn’t died.” And then there’s no further explanation.
For all its universality, this is a novel of its times. People are still deeply affected by the impact of World War 2. The medium, Fearmax, has had a basically reputable career as such. Notions of class, while beginning to unravel, are still very prominent (and perhaps they are still in Britain but I think it’s more pronounced here). Psychotherapy is an intriguing notion and people can’t quite figure out whether to view it as science or quackery. That doesn’t mean you need to understand 1940s Britain to get the novel; it just means that understanding these people live in a basically recognisable but actually very different world is an important thing to keep in mind. The past: they did things differently. Even in novels.
As to my earlier comment: there is no fantasy element to this story, even though it really felt like there should be, at times.
Marrow
I got this after reading Robert Reed’s collection The Greatship, which consists of course of stories all set on said Greatship. This novel takes some of those stories and characters and turns them into a more complex story.
The basic idea is that many centuries ago, humanity were lucky enough to be the ones to first spy this enormous ship hurtling between the galaxies, about to encounter the Milky Way. They sent out ships and claimed it, and after a while started to allow other sentient beings to come on board too – as passengers.
When Reed says Great, he means Great. In one of the short stories the ship is described as being roughly the size of Uranus – and entirely inhabited inside, which just gives the most mammoth scale. The title gives some indication what the focus of the story is….
There is nothing straightforward about this novel. Basically, the plot goes: twist – twist – double cross – twist – surprise! – twist – twist – KAPOW. It certainly kept me intrigued.
The one real problem I had with the book is the same one I had with the short stories. With functionally immortal human characters, Reed has no compunction about stretching the story over centuries – or millennia. And my brain just can’t deal with those sorts of spans of time, it seems, when the characters are basically standing still. (Because while the Greatship is, indeed, a ship, the point is not really the journey as it is on ships in, say, Alastair Reynolds’ books that also span a long time.) So sometimes I converted the years into days, and sometimes I just blanked on the number and read ‘an awfully long time’. And the specific time doesn’t really matter too much, so that worked out.
I guess you could call this ‘hard’ science fiction because there’s some stuff about science and all. I mention this because Reed’s bio says he’s got a reputation for ‘cutting-edge hard science fiction’. But the reality is that this story isn’t really about the science or engineering aspects of the problems facing the crew of the ship; it’s about the crew themselves, and how they react in situations and how they deal with each other and others they encounter. The rest of the bio does admit that his ‘hard science fiction’ is ‘bound together by strong characters and intricate plots’ which sounds to me like trying to avoid the idea that a man can write excellent science fiction that is, gasp, character and/or plot driven rather than entirely science-centric. This is me rolling my eyes.
Yesterday’s Kin
I got this from the Strange Horizons fundraising drive; I wanted to read more Nancy Kress 
because her After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall was just so darned good. Also to keep up my efforts to keep reading female authors.
This is a really clever alien contact story, which like so many of the good ones tells the reader more about humanity than about any putative alien species.
Here, an alien ship arrives – apparently from the direction of Deneb, although not actually – and eventually tells the humans that the Earth is heading for a ‘spore cloud’ that will have disastrous consequences. The aliens are here both to warn the Earth and to seek answers to the problem of the spores, which will get to their planet some time later.
The story is told by Marianne, a geneticist who gets involved in the work with the aliens, and her estranged son Noah. They bring completely different perspectives to the story, of course, which are nicely complementary; they also allow Kress to explore family issues which are crucial to the story she’s telling.
The science is really a important part of the story: how scientists work, what risks they can and should take, what everyday life in the lab is like (boring). Neither more nor less important is the social aspect. How does a mother deal with children who are different from her – and how do they deal with her? How can the world deal with knowing that there are aliens out there, and that a disaster is approaching? And then there’s the politics too: this is set in a US that has become increasingly isolationist, a powerful border security force and many people wanting heavy tariffs on imports and restricted migration – and how does that play with the arrival of aliens?
At 189 pages, this is a short novel; it’s fast-paced, easy to read, and wonderfully engaging.
The Romanovs
This book was provided to me by the publisher at no cost.
This book is a physical example of how hard it is to do complete histories of stuff from much before the 18th, even really 19th, century. Of the 650-odd pages, the last half covers less than the last century of the Romanov dynasty (which started in 1613 and went to 1918). Not because Michael or Peter the Great or Catherine the Great did less stuff, but because there’s less stuff firmly attested. Or attested at all. Whereas there are heaps of diaries and letters and non-Russian people talking about the goings-on certainly around Napoleon, and then even more so afterwards with the various power struggles, the Crimea, and then into the 20th century.
Anyway: this book is, as the name suggests, a biography of a dynasty. As with any biography there’s a certain frisson in knowing how everything ends – in this case, in a damp cellar with gunshots. I’ve done a fair bit of reading around the end of the dynasty (this bio of Alexander Kerensky was great, and I also read a bio of Nicholas and Alexandra recently), and I know names like Catherine the Great (it’s always weird to make connections like she’s active during the French Revolution), but I didn’t really know how it all connected. The answer is with blood, and sweat, and more blood, and a lot of trial and tribulation. Then more blood.
I was intrigued by, and quite liked, the format of the book. It’s divided into Acts: The Rise, The Apogee, The Decline. Each Act is divided into scenes, like The All-Drunken Synod and The Golden Age and Colossus, where the names are intended to reflect the individual Tsar (or, occasionally, Tsarina) who is the focus. It’s not quite a chapter per Tsar, in the earlier half, but it comes close. Additionally there’s a map early on showing the extent of the Romanov empire at different times, and each Act opens with a family tree, while each scene opens with a cast list – family, courtiers, other hangers-on. Which is a good thing because if I learnt nothing else I learnt:
- By golly there’s a lot of people with the same name in Russia over this period. I’m not just talking about the number of men called Alexander or Nicholas – Montefiore’s use of nicknames was a lifesaver – but the surnames! There’s like three important families! For three hundred years! … which also tells you something about the dynasty and who was important of course.
- If I thought the English royal family had a complicated family tree, I was kidding myself. The Romanovs are incredibly hard to follow – partly from marrying across generations, occasionally, but also with cousins coming and going and multiples wives and WHOA. I just gave up eventually.
There’s also quite a few pictures, in four different sets across the book, showing portraits and architecture and such things. I love that part of a good history book.
Other things I learnt:
- There were a surprising number of important women. Catherine I had acted as empress even before Catherine II reigned so superbly, and Anna was between both of them and Elizaveta, while Sophia was ‘Sovereign Lady’ for a while in the late 1600s and another Anna was briefly regent.
- Did I mention the blood? There was a lot of blood spilt by and for this dynasty. Like, a lot. Even if you don’t count the Napoleonic Wars (which were EPIC) and then World War I, of course, there was a LOT of fighting. Some of the blood was even Romanov blood… looking at you, Peter III, and all you would-be usurpers.
- There was a lot of infidelity. Two of my favourite picture captions are one depicting “A rare happy marriage” between Nicholas I and his Prussian wife Mouffy (this is another thing: the nicknames), while immediately below is a picture of Varenka Nelidova, “the beauty of Nicholas I’s court,” whom “he visited twice daily” because she was his favourite mistress. Not just mistress; favourite mistress. These Romanovs, they could not keep their pants on.
- How German the Romanovs were. So many princesses came from the German principalities – Hesse-Darmstadt, Wurttemberg, Holstein-Gottorp and so on – I’m frankly amazed that some more-Russian types didn’t do some maths and throw them over on account of not being very Russian. I guess that’s partly what Catherine II did, to her husband Peter III – where SHE is the formerly German princess and HE is acting all “I wish I were Prussian.”
- Napoleon was a cad. So were many of the Tsars.
The one thing that really bugged me was the use of footnotes. I want a history book to have copious endnotes where sources are detailed – this reassures me that the author really has done their research. When these are presented as footnotes, it clutters up the page too much. When the author uses endnotes for sources and footnotes for extra stuff that didn’t quite fit into their narrative, well, I’m largely ok with that – if it’s done well. Here it felt like there were footnotes on almost every other pages, and the thing that MOST annoyed me was that the symbol was almost never at the end of the sentence. Which for someone like me meant I was breaking in the middle of a sentence to go read a footnote that WASN’T ALWAYS ACTUALLY RELEVANT. I mean, what even is that about? By the second half I was basically training myself away from this compulsion and at least waiting to the end of the sentence, so that I wasn’t wasting time going back and re-reading the whole sentence. I’m still very bemused by a bunch of those footnotes because I don’t know why they were included, except to imagine Montefiore was just so excited by the fact that he wanted to include it.
While there were a few other stylistic tics that occasionally annoyed me, there was nothing bad enough to prevent me from reading this pretty steadily and basically enjoying the whole book. It’s a big book, but it doesn’t require much in the way of prior knowledge, so if you want an overview of Russian political history from 1613 to 1918 this is a pretty good place to get it. It’s also got violence and sex. Quite a lot of both. And some comparisons with modern Russian politics that gave me pause, too.
Radiance
This book was provided by the publisher at no cost.
My big problem in writing this review will be making sure it makes sense and isn’t just full of incoherent hand-waving. Here area a few initial points that will establish my position:
a) I’m really glad I got to read this before finalising (coughstartingcough) my Hugo nominations.
b) Because I got old, this is the first book in ages that I’ve stayed up past midnight to finish (18yo me is shaking her head in disappointment). Letting me finish it in a day (although not a sitting).
c) When I read Illuminae, I was immensely pleased with the found-footage style, but thought I wouldn’t want it to become TOO common. And then I read this. And now: I’m happy for Catherynne Valente* to use any damn style she likes.
So. This book.
This book is wonderful.
The New York Times describes it as “a sleek rocket ship of a novel swaddled in ArtDeco decadence.” That’s pretty apt.
The overview: set in an alternate universe where the solar system’s planets are all inhabitable, and where interplanetary travel kicked off even before the Wright brothers were doing their thing in our universe, the twentieth century has developed rather differently from ours. The focus is on the film industry, but there are tantalising glimpses into politics as well (like a reference to the Tsar in the 1940s). Anyway, the film industry has mostly developed on the Moon, and it’s a mostly silent industry, because of issues over paying for the rights to sound technology. One of the focal characters, Severin, has grown up with a director-father and eventually goes into the industry herself… and something happened when she’s shooting on location.
That really doesn’t do the novel justice, of course. The story doesn’t develop in a linear manner; it starts at the end and jumps all over the place, gradually filling in gaps. Some of the ‘footage’ comes from Severin’s childhood, when her father filmed her; some from the films of Severin herself, or her father. Some of the documents are in the form of diaries, or gossip columns. There are even ads. And all of it comes together, ultimately, to describe a rich and intriguing solar system, full of the sorts of people in ours – good and bad, selfish and selfless, looking for glory or love. They’re just further apart, being on different planets. And there’s a mystery that just keeps getting deeper and deeper and draws you further in and it’s just, well, radiant.
The story is excellent. But Valente is doing more than telling a luscious story. She’s interrogating ideas of reality and of memory and truth. After all, are you sure that those memories of your third birthday are your memories, or are they a patchwork made from photos and maybe footage and family stories? And if the latter is true, does it matter? What is reality, when it’s mediated through a lens? But then, what is story-telling but putting words to fragmented memories and trying to make sense of the world – as Valente, of course, is doing here.
I love the worlds that Valente has created, with the names of towns and features on the different planets relating to different godly versions of the planet’s namesake. I love that each has a different personality, reflecting in part which nation has settled there but also developing separately – and that despite this being a largely human-friendly system, there are still issues of colonial attitudes and how to feed everyone.
I love the prose.
I half-want a huge sprawling set of stories set in this universe, but at the same time I want this one beautiful object to exist in pristine serenity all by itself.
Other books this reminded me of: Christopher Priest’s The Islanders because of the way the plot is gradually unveiled. Every story ever set on a tropical Venus. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 because of the grand tour of the solar system.
Do not go into this book expecting ‘hard science’; this is not Greg Egan (although there are certainly some similarities in vibe). Don’t read it if you want a linear narrative. Do read it if you want to be swept up on a joyous sometimes confusing but breathtaking ride.
*Wordpress thinks her name is Catherine Valence, which is interesting enough but just no. Seriously.
Randomly Yours, Alex 