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  • Small talk passage from Slow Gods

    I myself have developed several algorithms for doing small talk when it is required, in order to help other people feel secure in my presence and thus improve my overall well-being through social cohesion. But what I struggle with is how this simple thing often escalates into a whole cultural performance. For having expressed “Hello, I see you, and you see me,” a veritable avalanche of small talk must then continue in which the participants go to extraordinary lengths to continue to talk about absolutely nothing of any significance or merit whatsoever, in a process that neither party seems to enjoy past the initial moment of connection. It is as if having established that each sees the other, they then agree by mutual consent to not look too closely, just in case they see something vulnerable, hurting, true.

    Or stranger still: you open with “Hello, isn’t the weather foul?” and before you know it, that little open door results in a flood of “Well actually my mother died yesterday and I’ve got a dreadful lung infection and it’s not getting better and I’ve been struggling to get out of bed in the mornings and my children won’t speak to me but you know, you know, it is what it is, isn’t it?”

    Under no circumstance must you say something meaningful in response to this; merely listen politely and reply, “That must be hard for you,” even if what you are hearing is a kind of death.

    A little connection, but never too much. This is the normality of the interaction, but the rules on how little is too little, how much is too much are never clear or explained. You are meant to “feel it out” and woe betide you if you get that judgement even marginally wrong, for then all connection is lost and you are other, other, other, and must alone continue, shunned for breaking a law that was never codified, violating a trust whose limits were never clear.

    Slow Gods by Claire North

  • All Systems Red by Martha Wells

    Oh my. Oh my goodness. Ann Leckie loved it, and I can see why. I am so very glad that there are three more on the way this year. The protagonist is a human/droid construct who calls itself Murderbot. I don’t love Murderbot quite as much as I love Breq (of Ann Leckie’s novels), but it comes very close.

    The first sequel doesn’t drop until tomorrow, so today I started another of her series. (The Cloud Roads: The Books of the Raksura Book 1)

  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

    I finished this a while ago, at the beginning of a recent trip and have neglected blogging about it. For some reason, I remembered The Dispossessed as a long, difficult, not particularly enjoyable read. It was not! I liked it! And there were many details I had no recollection of. With more experience and less idealism than when I first read it in my twenties, the ambiguity of the situation appealed to me this time.

    It’s interesting, however, that from the distance of just a couple of weeks, I once again don’t remember many of the details.  In that sense, my original response stands, that this is very much a novel of ideas for me, and much less so about character or plot.

  • Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

    Light is the left hand of darkness,
    and darkness the right hand of light.
    Two are one, life and death, lying
    together like lovers in kemmer,
    like hands joined together,
    like the end and the way.

    Ursula Le Guin’s recent death has set me on a rereading journey (and a reading journey: there’s still plenty of her work I’ve never read). I decided to start with Left Hand of Darkness, and it was fascinating to reread it. It stands up to the passage of time, and yet has not aged well. It is still a suspenseful tale, and it proposes thought experiments that are still relevant today. But the gender norms that the terran diplomat Genly Ai expresses (written in 1969 and projected into some unstated but future time) are already out of date. Conceptions not only of roles but also of gender identity have changed in major ways that make parts of the narrative distracting.

    This reread made me wonder why movies and television shows are routinely rebooted or redone but books rarely are (with the exception of parodies or pastiches that combine classic books with wildly different genre tropes). I’d really love to see a progressive, visionary, feminist author retell this story today.

    My perspective on the two main characters has shifted since I first read the novel. The protagonist Genly Ai so struck me previously that I’ve used the name “Genly” in several online locations when I needed a handle. On this reading, however, perhaps because I’m now middle-aged and was then more Genly Ai’s contemporary in age, I identified with Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. Estraven is the moral center: restrained, patient, mature, visionary, committed to a greater good, capable of intentional self-sacrifice. Ai is no less fascinating as a character (indeed, flaws are often the most fascinating things about characters); it’s just that I’ve gained a fuller appreciation for Estraven.

  • Reunited with an old friend

    For years, I have fondly remembered a novel I read when I was a kid. It was an adult novel, not a children’s book, and it was about people who moved from a city to the country to start a goat farm. I thought the title was Star Hill, and looked off and on over the years with no success. (Bear in mind I was reading a library book of unknown age in either the late sixties or early seventies.)

    Well, recently I was made aware of Internet Archive’s book program, and took another try at search algorithms—and I found it! Turns out the title is Thunder Hill, and it is by Elizabeth Nicholds, published by Doubleday in 1953. I found a copy for sale online and am having a lovely time dipping into it.

  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

    Having spent a lot of time in Second Life over the past eleven years, parts of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash are downright quaint: the ways in which he needs to explain avatars, or virtual spaces, or the word “metaverse.” And there are things he describes that have been implemented almost word-for-word in Second Life, which is kind of creepy.

    I enjoyed the story itself (and much more than Neuromancer, with which Snow Crash is often paired as precursors to parts of the internet and virtual reality). I’ve only read a few of Stephenson’s novels, but I rather enjoy the way they meander and take side trips.

  • Neuromancer by William Gibson

    I thought I might have read it a while ago, but absolutely nothing was familiar, so it must have been some other early cyberpunk novel. (I have Snow Crash up next, but its beginning isn’t ringing any bells, either.)

  • The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

    Not one of his best, but it was a quick, fun read. (Of his recent work, I most enjoyed The Collapsing Empire and am eager for its sequel.)

  • Emergence by C. J. Cherryh

    Finished it off in a little over a day. A satisfying (though fairly slight) episode in the ongoing science fiction soap opera.

  • Ken Scholes’s The Psalms of Isaak

    Over the holidays, I reread the first four volumes of Ken Scholes’s The Psalms of Isaak in preparation for the release of the fifth and final volume. I’m glad I did. There were things I had missed or didn’t remember. Hymn, the final volume, provided a satisfying conclusion (albeit with a bit of a deus ex machina—which is a pun, should you read the books) while leaving the door open for future stories in the same world. I hope Scholes does continue creating here.

    The books, in order:

    • Lamentation
    • Canticle
    • Antiphon
    • Requiem
    • Hymn