bloodygranuaile

As a little treat I bought myself the boxed set of the first four novellas in The Murderbot Diaries. I had them already on ebook, which I got for free, and have sent the ebook files to a couple other people, so multiple people have read them for free, but soon Amazon won’t support .mobi files anymore so those will be useless, and also I felt like it was probably high time I sent Martha Wells some monies for all the Murderbot. Anyway now I have nice shiny hard copies that I can lend people, but first I must reread them myself (and by “must” I mean that I want to).

All Systems Red takes place approximately 35,000 hours after Murderbot hacked its governor module, during which time it has mostly just done its job, and done time theft at its job by watching pirated television serials. This itself already makes Murderbot the most relatable robot ever written to probably 90% of its audience. I am not of the opinion that all protagonists have to be relatable but I will also fully admit that I am a huge Murderbot Enjoyer precisely because it is relatable–and at least in my case, because it is relatable in a lot of ways that a) I don’t see that much in fiction and b) are funny because it’s a cyborg. Like, I’m 35. I’ve already eaten through a lifetime’s supply of books with protagonists who are shy, bookish human brunettes who think they’re better than everyone else (yet inevitably wind up in a romantic plotline). It’s novel to find a character relatable because it’s grumpy about security work and being dragged away from its emotional support melodramas.

The plots of these novellas had all gotten tangled up in my head since I binge-read them two years ago so I actually did not have a great idea of what was going on here. ART isn’t in this one yet. This book is about a survey expedition on an uninhabited planet, or rather about three survey expeditions on an uninhabited planet–the PreservationAux one, where Murderbot is employed; a slightly larger one called DeltFall, who PreservationAux is aware of and appears distantly friendly with; and the secret murdery one from GrayCris, who will become a major antagonist throughout the story arc, the only company that makes Murderbot’s unnamed-on-principle shitty-ass company look like good guys. These books don’t have the kind of incredibly rewarding reread value that, say, The Locked Tomb has, but it was nice to re-discover what was going on and I think I could easily end up rereading these multiple times as one of my very limited stable of comfort rereads–they’re short and quick to get through so I don’t feel like I’m sinking in a lot of time I could be spending on something new, and at least I don’t reread Murderbot as much as Murderbot rewatches Sanctuary Moon.

I have been on an Ursula K. Le Guin kick but I have not been on a “keeping on top of my social calendar” kick, so I reread The Dispossessed mostly in the week after the book club we were supposed to have on it. (In keeping with this winter’s inability to do things in a timely manner, I also renewed the book after finishing reading it so that I don’t have to walk to the library in 23-degree weather and will drop it off sometime in the next two weeks when I’m either already in the car or it warms up.)

The Dispossessed is such a much-discussed classic of leftist sci-fi that it’s hard to think of anything new to say about it. It ought to be endlessly discussable since there’s just so much going on there, but having missed the opportunity to discuss it in a group, trying to have thoughts about it on my own now seems to be sort of missing the point (perhaps egoizing, as the Anarresti would say). If the book has a theme it seems like it would be something like “doing utopia is hard,” but that makes it sound very flat. Duh, doing utopia is hard (although sometimes you do meet folks who seem to expect otherwise). It’s a very profound and sensitive exploration of the limits of politics in fulfilling personal psychological needs, the ways in which people can misunderstand and fall short of ideals, the development and enforcement of social norms, and what is the proper weight to give one’s neighbors’ opinions. It’s much more complicated than merely “people misunderstanding leftist theory and being assholes about it” although there is a little of that, too. I also like it because it explores some things that I think some leftists brush off as being strawmen and other leftists do actually make assumptions about but don’t examine: things like, what is the responsible way to be a solitary, weird, introverted person in a cooperative society? Where do “political ideals to live up to” end and “telling people what personality to have” begin? Is it really that more enlightened to live in a big pile of other people, or is it OK to want your own room just so that you can be alone in it? Le Guin is able to very unflinchingly look at the flaws of a society run entirely–and, mostly, successfully!--on anarcho-communist principles, but never falls into the trap of framing it as that the problem is that they have Gone Too Far or that Urrasti society, for all its comforts (for the privileged, at least), is any better or ~also valid~ or whatever mealy-mouthed shit it’s apparently obligatory for anyone writing about liberatory politics to include. Anarres has problems because ekeing out a living on the barren moon they’ve been banished to, in a tiny community cut off from the rest of the species, made up of ordinary working people who are, after all, merely human beings, is extremely difficult, and fuckups happen.

And how do you know what even are the fuckups, sometimes? All of Shevek’s reasons for wanting to leave his little colony and unbuild walls, to not be cut off from the rest of humanity, to share scientific knowledge, are all good ones, but he eventually decides that going to Urras to be kept as a pet anarchist at a capitalist university was a mistake. But was it inherently a mistake to want to do the things he wanted to do? Or was the mistake just being unprepared for the obstacles to doing them–underestimating the power of the capitalist university to co-opt and tame radicals? I don’t know! Like I have thoughts, but I don’t know; there’s too much going on here to really know it all after only reading the book twice.

Anyway I hope I will read this again in another five years and be able to get more things out of it. I don’t reread books very often but this one is absolutely worth revisiting every few years if you’re active on the left (and possibly also if you’re inactive on the left).

 

I had intended to do this in January immediately after my reread of Gideon the Ninth but then life and book clubs got in the way, so it was only this weekend that I finally reread Harrow the Ninth, the second book in Tamsyn Muir’s certifiably insane and gothically delicious Locked Tomb trilogy. Notable occurrences upon second read, especially so soon after rereading Gideon, include “I understood what was going on a lot better,” “I caught more hilarious references that had apparently passed me by the first time,” and “OK now it’s actually quite clear what’s going on, I can’t believe I was so confused the first time, did I read this in a coma or something,” although the more likely culprit is just that my close-reading skills have atrophied in the 10 years since I’ve been in school from doing only business writing where the actual task at hand is to just find the simplest big-picture points to distill out of a page of writing. But in novels, it turns out sometimes the details are important! 

Anyway, while most of this book is a lot darker and more fucked up than the first one, especially in the beginning, there were still several moments where I couldn’t help actually laughing out loud, a thing that rarely happens for me when I’m reading, and which especially hadn’t been happening this week, when I hit one of those walls where I got tired of doing responsible shit and just dropped all my coping mechanisms and opted to go ahead and be miserable for a bit. It was also frankly sort of soothing to read about people having a way worse time than I’m having and not necessarily powering through it like emotionally unbreakable protagging machines. 

Because Harrow is a tiny nerd, this book did not inspire me to do between-chapter workouts as much as Gideon did, although I did manage to roll off the couch and make myself do 15 minutes of yoga about halfway through it, which is more than I’d managed all week. Neither did it inspire me to make soup.

So, despite generally falling super far behind on reading along with Mark Reads, I did manage to finish up Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery only a day or two after the final post went up.

Sourcery is one of the books that I have only read once ever, and therefore have forgotten basically everything about. There are quite a number of these, particularly early in the series. I’d had it mentally filed away as one of the “not very good” ones, comparatively speaking, and for some reason I thought it was a standalone (perhaps I was mashing it up with Eric in my head?), even though it is actually a Rincewind book.

This time around, I think it’s still not going to stick with me as a particular favorite Discworld book, but hopefully I’ll remember that it is good, because it’s worth remembering. Sourcery charts the rise and fall of Coin, a sourcerer—the eighth son of a wizard who was already the eighth son of an eighth son, and so who is himself a source of magic, instead of just someone with the ability to wield it. This is deeply, deeply dangerous, particularly as eight-year-old Coin, armed with his father’s deeply creepy staff, sets out to have wizards conquer the world. This, of course, causes chaos and death and destruction and, as usually happens, opens a path for the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions.

In all this, Rincewind, having run away, partly due to his own cowardice and partly on the urging of the Archchancellor’s Hat, falls in with a couple of weird adventurers and proceeds to have lots of chaotic shenanigans where Rincewind keeps trying to run away and his damn friends keep trying to save the world. Eventually, Rincewind, with the help of the Librarian, who continues to be awesome, manages to figure out what’s really going on with little Coin, and then things get deep and sad as well as chaotic and wacky, because that’s how Terry Pratchett books work.

There are some particularly excellent puns in this one that I am glad to have rediscovered, especially the one about appendectomies, and it’s great to start to see some more continuity and character development across books as the series starts settling into being a series, and with Rincewind’s sub-series specifically.