bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with time travel

Last Christmas I picked up a copy of Octavia Butler’s Kindred at the Strand, because everything I’ve ever read by Butler has been absolutely steller, and then every time since then I’ve looked at my shelf to decide what to read I’ve decided to pick up something that seemed less depressing. I finally got past that a few days ago because it is February so a) good depressing reading time of year and also b) it’s Black History Month but I wasn’t in the mood for nonfiction quite yet.

Kindred tells the story of Dana, a modern young Black woman living in Los Angeles in 1976, because that was basically present-day when this book was first published in 1979. On her 26th birthday, Dana gets unceremoniously yoinked back to the 1810’s to save the life of a redheaded young white boy named Rufus, the son of a plantation owner in Maryland. Rufus, it turns out, is one of Dana’s ancestors a few generations back, and so apparently it is Dana’s cosmic responsibility to bail his accident-prone ass out of near-death situations to ensure he survives long enough to father her however-many-times-great-grandmother Hagar. In what is a short span of time on the 1970s end but over the course of about 20 years on the 1800s end, Dana makes six trips back in time to save Rufus’ life, as he grows from a bratty but more or less innocent child into a complicated, vicious douchebag of a propertied antebellum Southern man. Dana does what she can to complicate his understanding of the world but he’s still the son of a slaveowner who will grow up to be a slaveowner himself, and he’s nowhere near heroic enough to transcend his upbringing. Dana manages to talk him into a couple things that are progressive-for-the-time, like acknowledging his children and allowing Dana to teach some of the enslaved children to read, but every advance is a long hard slog and Dana has to fight Rufus and his shitty parents about everything.

The trips vary in length; the first trip she’s barely there for a few minutes; some of the others last months. On one of them her white husband, Kevin, gets carried along for the ride; he gets left behind when she goes back to the ‘70s, and she has to find him again the next time she’s pulled back, a week later on one end and five years later on the other. On these visits to the past Dana witnesses and endures all the horrors of slavery; she is reasonably privileged by being enslaved standards in that she “gets” to be a house slave instead of a field slave (minus one memorable episode where she gets sent into the fields as a punishment); she still endures various beatings and assaults and getting shot at and a dizzying array of indignities large and small. The novel also provides a fascinating psychological portrayal of learning to navigate–and, in the process, acclimatize to, a process that Dana is self-aware about–the degradation of enslavement.

The book is not just “torture porn,” though. The real horrors here, which Butler portrays thoughtfully and deftly, are the warped relationships and manipulations that characterize the internal politics of the plantation–the use and abuse of child slaves to keep their parents in line, the ways the adults do and don’t submit to abasement to try to “manage up” their capricious masters, even the tragic warping and destruction of whatever capacity for human decency the white masters might have been born with. Life on the Weylin plantation isn’t just straightforwardly horrific; it is complicatedly horrific, intensely dysfunctional even for the people who are on top of the heap–the Weylins are some of the most miserable bastards you’ll ever meet, with absolutely no coping mechanisms for their miserable bastardness other than inflicting even greater misery on everyone around them. Dana is constantly in danger; while she gets pulled into the past when Rufus’ life is in danger, she only goes home when her own life is–and she goes home six times, too.

A lot of critical literature has been written about Butler’s writing in the last few decades, and it’s been long enough since I engaged with any sort of literary criticism that I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything intelligent to say compared to the people who are still practiced in thinking deeply and critically about literature. But I will say that this book–and everything else by her that I’ve read–is a masterpiece and I recommend it highly.

The book we chose for the next BSpec book club was the highly hyped novella from Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War. An epistolary novella about agents on opposite sides of an epic "time war" who begin a forbidden correspondence, it was one of the most hotly anticipated new releases at Readercon, and I was unable to pick up a copy because they sold out so fast. I did get to attend the discussion on "How We Wrote This Is How You Lose the Time War," which was absolutely delightful. Since everyone seemed to agree that the book was also delightful and I felt I was in need of something nice and light to read, I lobbied hard for it at book club selection.

Somehow my brain did not put together "romance" and "epistolary novel" properly, and I did not realize until after I started reading it that the book is composed mostly of love letters. So while the book is indeed nice and funny and full of epic violence and incomprehensible timey-wimey stuff and generally the sort of thing I like, reading it also means reading a bunch of other people's love letters, which is, honestly, something I tend to find very boring. Love letters are, as a genre, overwritten, full of dreadful pet names and daydreaming, and generally unreadable, as far as I'm concerned. Objectively, it's better written than most regular assholes' attempts at love letters, but a lot of it is still the same basic type of writing that I simply cannot get into. Big chunks of it remind me of reading Oscar Wilde's prose poems -- and while Oscar Wilde is undoubtedly one of my favorite writers, this isn't a compliment, because I still have no idea what the actual fuck is the point of a prose poem or why anyone would be expected to either write or read one.

Apart from the long strings of cutesy pet names and sappy daydreaming about spending time together, there is a hell of a story in Time War, featuring some absolutely remarkable worldbuilding. Blue and Red, our alternating viewpoint characters, are both highly skilled special agents in their respective sides of the Time War, civilizations that function totally differently--one is a highly technological cyberpunk sort of deal, called the Agency, all coding and body-mod and sleek sharp futuristic nonsense. The other, where Blue is from, is called the Garden, and is a sort of vaguely mystical plant-based consciousness. The story follows the back-and-forth of their missions in the Time War, and their increasing complicity in pulling their punches so as not to actually eliminate the other party. By the time the plot hits its climax, Red and Blue have done such wild things to time that Red has to basically tear it apart to prevent Blue from being killed before they can even meet. This is the high-concept sci-fi stuff that I actually understand the appeal of, and it was fantastic.

I think we'll have a fun time discussing it at book club, even if I am going to be the cranky aromantic one complaining about how it didn't feel tight enough because all the letters were full of fluff.

Since it is Labor Day weekend, I felt very strongly that I did not want to do anything that could be considered productive if I did not have to; in addition, I was in need of a palate cleanser after reading the educational and distressing Evicted. In other words, it was Cheesy Vampire Novel O'Clock.

I decided upon Deborah Harkness' The Book of Life, the third book in her witch/vampire romance All Souls trilogy, a set of doorstoppers stuffed with witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, time travel, srs bsns historical research, fake genetics, wealth porn, gratuitous Frenchness, the obligatory impossible vampire pregnancy plotline, elite academia, sexy libraries, and lots of wine (some vampires never drink... vine. These are not those vampires). In short, it's like Outlander for vampire nerds (and less racist, not like that's the world's highest bar to clear).

My biggest issue with this book is entirely my own fault, which is that it's been like six years since I read Shadow of Night and I forgot a lot of what happened? I remembered they went back in time to 1591 and Diana got pregnant and met Matthew's several-decades-dead terrifying vampire patriarch, Philippe. And that there was a Scottish vampire who had been a gallowglass and now his name was Gallowglass, just in case you were afraid we were going to leave out the sexy Scotsman from this time-traveling vampire romance. But this is a very big complex story with many threads and many, many characters across timelines, and vampire families are huge hierarchical monstrosities of tangled pack dynamics and generational sprawl, and so I was very lost for quite a lot of it. That's what I get for acquiring too many books and not finishing series in a timely manner, I suppose.

Like many vampire books, huge chunks of this series are basically just wish fulfillment for nerdy ladies. While some of the wish fulfullment aspects do not reflect any of my wishes and therefore fall a bit flat ("He's authoritarian and broody but he's also terribly tall" is basically Why I Do Not Read Romance Novels, also, I honestly consider "interested in genetics" to be a huge red flag, although perhaps it is less red flaggy for actual genetics researchers), other aspects of it go right to my lizard brain, like "has magical powers" and "gets to live in multiple fancy homes from multiple interesting historical time periods," not to mention "elite access to extremely fancy libraries" and "can actually memorize mystical shit beyond half the Tarot deck" (I have been reading Tarot for 15 years and only have half the deck memorized; this is how much I don't rely on my own brain for things). Diana also apparently goes months without checking her email, which annoys all the other characters but honestly sounds fucking glorious.

The book also features interstitial excerpts from Diana's commonplace book from the 16th century in which she takes notes on the signs of the Zodiac, and if you think I'm not going to copy them into my own little baby Book of Shadows later this morning, you have underestimated how much I am witchy pop culture trash.

I started reading Elizabeth Bear's One-Eyed Jack: A Novel of the Promethean Age a little over a year ago, in the bathtub at Mohegan Sun.

It has taken me so long to finish the book not because it wasn't good, but because I have only read it in the bath — sometimes at casinos but also sometimes not, otherwise it would have taken me even longer, especially considering the last casino I stayed at only had a shower. My copy is now very water damaged.

Anyway. I had picked One-Eyed Jack for my casino bath reading because it's about the spirit of Las Vegas fighting to keep his city from being annexed by the spirit of Los Angeles, so it seemed topical.

There are actually two spirits (or genii) of Las Vegas: the One-Eyed Jack, who has one normal eye and one magical eye he keeps hidden under an eyepatch; and the Suicide King, otherwise known as Stewart, who seems to have a magical ability to kill himself and then resurrect again. Jackie and Stewart are boyfriends in addition to sharing the job of genius of Las Vegas. This seems like it would break a lot of workplace regulations but it looks like being a magical symbol isn’t a very well-regulated field considering all the other stuff that goes down in this book.

Jackie and Stewart eventually form a coalition with several interesting characters, including two ghosts of different John Henrys, some "media ghosts" of unnamed TV spies, and vampire Elvis (though this vampire Elvis is very different from the vampire Elvis of the Sookie Stackhouse books). The antagonists include Angel (the genius of Los Angeles, in the form of a young ingénue), a character known only as “the assassin,” a Promethean Mage, and the ghost of Bugsy Siegel.

I was a bit confused about who precisely all these people were, since I am not much up on my ‘60s TV spies — nor on my Las Vegas history, really, although I do at least know who Bugsy Siegel is. But once I got used to identifying the spies by their descriptors instead of names, it was all easy enough to follow.

The book takes place mostly in 2002, and as is usually the case, I still find it a bit jarring to realize how long ago the mid-2000s were and how much it really was a different era — it makes me feel old — but it’s impossible to miss because stuff in Vegas changes so fast that, even without ever having been there, I know a bunch of the properties mentioned in the book have since shut down and new ones opened; also, Jackie wears black leather cargo pants because he is terribly cool, and it’s become hard to remember that there was a time when cargo pants really were cool and not just a shorthand for sartorial laziness. Other bits of the book take place in 1964, because that’s when all the media ghosts come from. The time travel isn’t flashy; it just sort of happens—there’s enough ghosts in the story already that visiting the ghost of 1964 isn’t that big a deal.

Since this is a spy story I don’t want to talk too much about the plot but suffice to say that, in keeping with the general theme, it, like a game of poker, features long stretches of quietly waiting and thinking about things (I don’t believe poker is ever boring) interspersed with moments of high drama that vastly change the dynamics at the table. (Poor Angel spends the first three-quarters of the book chipping up relentlessly only to spew off her entire stack in one dumb play. Been there done that; it’s awful.) All the disparate threads and meticulously solved riddles finally come together near the end to put a fast-paced and deceptively simple end to the conspiracy.

One of the unifying principles of how magic works in this book is that it relies very heavily on symbolism and stories and beliefs, reminding me a lot of Discworld if the Discworld books were about twelve thousand percent more serious. Genre savviness is important for our heroes to figure out what is going on. Gaming-related symbolism abounds, which is fitting, because gaming-related symbolism abounds in English writing anyway, only this time it’s all looked at a lot more closely than usual.

Like the other Elizabeth Bear books I’ve read, this was pretty weird and I think I’d have to read it again to figure out some of the weird stuff I didn’t get the first time around, but I’m probably not going to because I have at least three unread Elizabeth Bear books on my shelf at the moment. I always like her stuff but it tends to end up taking me a lot longer to get through than I think it’s going to.

I recommend it to anyone who likes metafictional genre-savvy stuff. Pairs well with a Lush bath bomb, a nice hotel room, and an adult beverage.

The next book for BSpec's book club is Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y, which Lyndsay chose upon her appointment to the rotating dictatorship of book club. I'm pretty sure Lyndsay has also given me another Scarlett Thomas book out of the HMH stash, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, because ::gestures to TBR shelves::.

The title of this book is also the title of the book that this book is about, in the tradition of many other books about books. In this one, The End of Mr. Y is a little-known 19th-century work of fiction of which there is only one known copy in the world, and which is supposedly cursed, because everyone who has ever read it has died.

Our protagonist is Ariel Manto, an English Lit Ph.D. student doing a thesis on thought experiments. She's interested in the little-known 19th century philosopher who wrote The End of Mr. Y, as is her Ph.D. supervisor, who mysteriously disappears. Some time after he disappears, Ariel finds a copy of the book in a secondhand bookshop, and finds the recipe for a tincture that can take the drinker into a sort of mind-jumping Matrix-like telepathy-land that the author of The End of Mr. Y called the Troposphere.

At first I found Ariel a very relatable protagonist in that she is an overthinking, anxiety-brained, potato-baking, financially strapped book nerd with a general interest in weird nineteenth-century stuff but a sustained tendency toward serially obsessive topic-hopping, researching her way around different subjects every month. Before she does her Ph.D. she writes a magazine article called Free Association, published monthly, which sounds like a fantasy writing assignment -- she basically takes an entire month to write each article, and just writes about whatever topic she's interested in that month. (The fact that she can subsist off of one piece of writing each month pretty much blew my suspension of disbelief to hell, even if this book was published pre- the world economy imploding and takes place outside the U.S. But it was a nice fantasy.) She gets laid more than me, but not only do all novel protagonists, I'm pretty sure most real people do as well. But as the book went on, and Ariel drifted more and more into being a sort of stock Troubled Antihero, I grew more and more annoyed with the sort of flatly gritty quality of the book's depictions of the "real" world. Ariel started to remind me of The Toast's piece "A Day in the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero," except that she was female, which ought to be a bigger subversion than this felt like -- it was still all cigarettes and colorless sex, both of which are tropes that I feel are basically cheap ways of establishing a book as A Book for Adults. Characters who have a lot of sex but are too deep or damaged or whatever to enjoy any of it are one of my pet peeves, as is deliberately writing sex scenes with no emotion to them whatsoever just to establish that the character/the author/the audience/someone somewhere, I don't know, is definitely world-weary and blase enough to know that sex happens but it's nothing to get excited about. A one-paragraph sex scene randomly inserted into another scene that you could cut out without interrupting the flow of the conversation at all is one that probably should be cut. Also, if you're going to throw a lot of pointless sex into a book just for the sake of -mundanity and realism- and stuff, I'm going to notice things like that nobody ever uses condoms and the main character doesn't seem to be on birth control of any sort, yet nobody has even a single passing thought about the possibility of pregnancy or STDs.

From that point, other stuff started to annoy me more: The MC is apparently quite poor, and much attention is paid to having little money (which I relate to), but she doesn't seem to have any of the strings that being poor usually comes with: She doesn't have a credit card, she doesn't seem to have any debt, when she abandons her apartment she doesn't seem to be worried about any kind of liability for not making the next month's rent -- she's basically poor but free in a way that being poor doesn't really allow people to be free. It gives the whole thing a sort of ungrounded quality that renders all the other kinds of details that seem to be trying to establish groundedness (i.e., the constant monitoring of how much cash she has on hand -- a set of mental calculations that I am, in fact, quite familiar with) feel like a sort of poverty-chic set dressing rather than having much urgency to them. And I'm not even going to get into how the whole Aimless Academic trope that's so popular is just wildly contrary to anything I hear coming out of academia these days. Maybe it's a British vs. US thing, maybe it's an old economy vs. new economy thing, but if Ariel Manto were at a US university in 2016 trying to do what she's doing, she'd be an adjunct professor with multiple courses to teach and $90K in student loan debt, and she'd have fought out fifty competitors tooth and nail for the position, rather than being randomly invited to do a Ph.D. at a conference and just showing up and doing it.

The other thing that messed with my suspension of disbelief is that the mystical tincture that brings people to the magical realm of the troposphere is a homeopathic remedy, which means it's almost entirely water.

There are more advanced scientific concepts tackled in the book, including lots of physics ones that I am minimally familiar with, so I cannot nitpick them. But the characters specifically talk about learning a lot of these concepts from popular science books, and in the areas of science in which I am more than minimally well-versed, the gaps between real science and popular science are a major source of interest to me. An especially interesting article I read yesterday actually did talk about this problem as it relates to theoretical physics. The result: I'm enormously, if uninformedly, skeptical of about 99% of the discussions about science in this book, and this book is in very large part discussions of science and philosophy and the nature of reality and all that. The philosophy I could also probably stand to be better versed in. But ultimately, while using simplifications, metaphors, and models can help you understand scientific concepts at a rudimentary level, having an understanding of the simple versions of scientific concepts doesn't help you solve actual problems in those fields. Ariel Manto is about as well equipped to come up with major breakthroughs in anything physics-related as I am to personally design and program a functioning digital currency system (I just did a month's research and wrote an article on bitcoin). This book definitely belongs to a subcategory of "trashy-intellectual" that I actually tend to like quite a lot -- the Outlander books have a similar "my research, let me show u it" vibe, as does the Discovery of Witches series. I am enormously susceptible to this particular brand of guilty pleasure. I found myself wanting to challenge this one a lot more than I usually do, probably because the research concepts it's splashing around in are fundamental questions about the nature of reality so it seems to be taking itself really seriously, even though it's basically just a big nerd-neurosis fantasy along the lines of Dune but for different types of nerd-neurosis. The story eventually seems to conclude that you can rewrite the universe by thinking about it sophisticatedly enough, which I think is clearly a "What am I doing with my life, what is the point of doing all this obscure research nobody cares about" academic-existential-crisis-assuaging sort of fantasy.

Which, quite frankly, I do think is a really interesting set of fears to write a wish-fulfillment story for.

And frankly, the Troposphere was fun. The general mystery with the book and the being chased by ex-CIA agents and jumping around in people's minds and through history and into being mice and cats and other people was a good dramatic fantasy romp. The excerpts of fake 19th-century writing with its ploddingly moralistic tone and creepy, tawdry circuses were delightful. Many of the secondary characters are flat-out hilarious, although I'm not sure they're intended to be. The whole thing would make a trippy as hell animated miniseries or something; or even a live-action one with maybe an exaggerated Tim Burton-y aesthetic. I would totally watch that.

I'll be interested to see what aspects of the book people seize on to talk about at book club. Since this is BSpec book club and not the sci-fi group book club, I think I can at least count on the discussion not being just three hours of How Does Time Travel Work, at least.

The last book I read in 2015 was the fourth installment of the Outlander franchise, Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon. At this point, Jamie and Claire have arrived in the semiwilderness of the colony of North Carolina, ten years or so before the American Revolution. There are a lot of Scotsmen in North Carolina. Some of them fled impoverishment and persecution to set themselves up as plantation and slave owners, following the grand American tradition of fleeing persecution to engage in a little persecution of one's own. Other Scots have come over via indenture, either voluntary or involuntary. (Hell, I think some of the came over via involuntary indenture and bought slaves once their indenture was over; people can be shitty like that.)

In contrast to the last book, which I call "Highlanders of the Caribbean" even though that's not actually its name, Claire and Jamie mostly stay in North Carolina through this one. They meet another one of Jamie's unnumerable relatives, a badass, blind old lady named Jocasta Cameron, who welcomes them and immediately starts scheming to put Jamie in charge of her plantation so that other people stop trying to marry it out from under her. This doesn't sit too well with either Jamie or Claire, since the plantation comes with a great number of slaves and can't be maintained without them, and, since Claire and Jamie are our heroes, they can't possibly countenance slave ownership. Instead, Jamie runs off and starts rustically homesteading a nearby patch of woodland he calls Fraser's Ridge, and it's all very Little House on the Prairie for a bit, except for being woodland instead of prairie.

It's Claire's daughter Brianna, it turns out, and Geilis Duncan's descendant Roger Wakefield who do the bulk of the traveling in this book. After finding a death notice for Claire and Jamie Fraser for 1776, Brianna travels back through the stones at Inverness to warn them. Roger follows once he figures out what's going on, and they each make their way to North Carolina, miraculously not dying, although they certainly meet up with their share of terrible and slightly cliche adventures, including Roger getting kidnapped by Mohawks and Brianna getting raped by a pirate. Honestly, if the plot weren't buried under such a great amount of detail and strong characterization, it would probably be awful -- most of the plot points in this book are pretty overdone in either romances or historical fiction. A huge chunk of the adventuring in the second half of the book comes from the sort of idiotic miscommunication that could have been easily cleared up by conversing like normal humans instead of romance novel twerps. Jamie is all Jealous Father about Roger, and Brianna of course gets pregnant immediately upon becoming sexually active. Some people think the book might need a bit of editing down, since it is rather enormous, but I think that would be a mistake. It's the huge amounts of ridiculous research, tiny details, wacky secondary characters, and psychological meanderings through the minds of the main characters that really make the book something worth reading, at least if you're a history nerd looking for some exciting and slightly trashy melodrama that doesn't insult your intelligence.

I'm definitely going to keep up with this series, probably no matter how overblown it gets. It's just too much fun.

Current Mood: still sick
Current Location: Vox on Two Apartments
Current Music: Star Wars

Well, I am on a roll with reading books wrong. In the case of Diana Gabaldon's Voyager, the third book in the Outlander series, it's because I got it out of the library, only read 25% of it before I had to return it about two months ago, got back in line, and read the rest of it last week when it finally cycled back to me.

While Outlander took place almost entirely in Scotland, and Dragonfly in Amber brought us as far as France, the aptly named Voyager brings us basically everywhere. Acting on news from the research project she, Brianna, and Roger started in 1968, Claire moves from Boston back to Scotland, travels back through the stone circles at Craigh na Dun to sometime in the 1760s, tracks down Jamie in Edinburgh, and from there a relentless flood of shenanigans takes them all around Scotland, then to France, and then back over the Atlantic to the Caribbean. And that's just the main plotline, from Claire's perspective. We also get POVs from Jamie, as he does all sorts of dramatic Highlander things like hide in a cave for seven years and escape from an English prison; from Roger; and from one Lord John Grey, who seems to have a bunch of his own spinoff novels now.

The book is also kind of all over the place in other ways, too. Some of it is very serious--Jamie's time in Ardsmuir, for example, is pretty dark, treated with all seriousness and mostly not filled with highly improbable action-hero hijinks. Other bits are, uh, not--once they get on a boat everything basically becomes "Highlanders of the Caribbean" and it's all very colorful and almost absurdly action-packed, and develops a serious case of Les Mis-level small world syndrome (you know how in Les Mis, Paris has like twenty people and one policeman and one apartment to rent? In Voyager, the entire British Empire has about twenty people, one ship, and two military officers).

One of the big effects of leaving the rural Scottish highlands is that there are a lot more people of color in this book, which is a thing that can obviously go very wrong very quickly, especially considering the time period is really the height of British colonial power in the New World (it's like, 10 years before the American Revolution starts, I think) and the slave trade is in full swing. I have... mixed feelings about how this is handled. It's clearly well researched, which certainly helps it avoid some of the more common myths and pitfalls about the time (most notably, Gabaldon knows what involuntary indenture is and the ways in which it is similar to and different from chattel slavery; this shouldn't be noteworthy but it is). But the general approach she takes to characterizing pretty much all ethnicities--which is not so much to avoid stereotypes, but to deliberately walk straight into them and then try to build up more perspective/characterization on top of it--works slightly less well with, for example, the one Chinese character--a short, frequently drunk man with very bad English whose skillset is basically a grab bag of Chinese Things, including Chinese herbal medicine, acrobatics, calligraphy, acupuncture, and, of course, magic--than it does with any one of the ten billion Scots that populate the series. (Granted, one of the things I do kind of like about the books is that every culture the characters come into contact with has its own magical traditions and they all appear to work equally well, but the execution can still feel a bit clumsy--like, this random English lady keeps finding herself in situations where every time she meets new people she gets to witness their magic in action. Every single time.) The one Chinese dude is an especially interesting case of both being an interesting character and giving me wincy feelings because he's a fairly major secondary character and he gets a good amount of page time. He's known throughout the book as Mr. Willoughby, which is obviously not his name but was bestowed upon him in a well-meaning but ultimately worse-than-useless attempt to help him blend in. He's sometimes a comic character but other times a very tragic one, especially when you finally learn his backstory--something I found particularly interesting was that a major part of his backstory is that he is actually kind of a sexist dillweed, in the hopeless-romantic-with-ludicrously-unrealistic-views-of-women method that made me like him a bit less as a reader but is clearly a huge point of commonality between him and a lot of the white dudes in the book. By the end of the story I actually did like him, but there were a couple of cringeworthy scenes to get to that point.

Also cringeworthy is an appearance of one of my least favorite tropes EVER, actually I don't really know if it's a trope but I have seen it in one other book at least, which makes two too many--where a nice white lady who is very opposed to slavery gets so upset about it that she winds up owning one, because that is totally a thing that happens, and it is very upsetting, because clearly the important thing about slavery is how hard it would be on anti-slavery white people to be landed with one, and now she has to decide how best to go about being a good white savior, which in both cases I've read have inexplicably involved steps other than "ask person what they want and do it." I partly don't like this trope because it smacks very strongly of "author's personal self-examination and thought exercises leaking onto the paper"; in this case, many of the compounding issues that cropped up in the Jackie Faber book where this happens are thankfully avoided, but at least in the series so far, I can't help but think that the entire subplot with Temeraire could have been completely excised with no harm done to the rest of the book whatsoever.

These are the low points. There are many, many other things going on in this book (these books tend to be pretty densely packed with a wide assortment of Things), including the reappearance of Geillis Duncan (who is a major creeper), our first gay character who isn't predatory and terrible, hints of family backstory and things for Claire's Boston doctor friend Joe Abernathy (JOE ABERNATHY IS GREAT), lots of ladies with lots of agency in different ways all along the moral spectrum, and, as usual, a lot of sex, although kilts have been sadly outlawed at this point so Jamie is reduced to constantly wearing breeches. And have I mentioned the MELODRAMATIC ADVENTURES ON THE HIGH SEAS? It is everything you could want out of a melodramatic adventure on the high seas; I think Gabaldon had a checklist of Stuff That Happens When Adventure On the High Seas and made sure every point got in there somewhere--there is kidnapping, espionage, shipwrecks, slave revolts, an outbreak of plague, naval battles, pirate attacks, smuggling, big storms, seasickness, hardtack with weevils, a Portuguese pirate with too much jewelry and a cutlass, stowaways, a parentally disapproved-of romance, and even a dude with a hook for a hand, although the said dude is Fergus, who we actually met in the last book and who lost his hand long before becoming a sailor. At one point there is even a big hat. (Note: People for whom melodramatic pirate adventures are NOT catnip might find this half of the book frustrating, the way I find cartoon physics in non-cartoon movies frustrating, because it kind of pushes against one's suspension of disbelief sometimes. I'm just willing to overlook this because for me, melodramatic pirate adventures are SUPER CATNIP.)

On a more serious note, the looks we get into the British penal and colonial systems, in Scotland and elsewhere, are really, really well done, I think--they're very informative but also very emotionally engaging, and involve a lot of heavy stuff about power and identity, which is especially apt since the British relied even more heavily on eradicating people's identity to conquer them than they did on brute force (not like brute force wasn't a major component, of course). I particularly appreciate the looks at the basically decent English people who were still complicit in and perpetrators of these colonial systems that very definitely weren't at all about "helping" or "civilizing" any of the people in the lands the British took over and who the English definitely never saw as their fellow countrymen, even the sort of nice ones, no matter what the official imperialist rhetoric was.

This book's story arc never particularly wraps up--it just leads right into the next book, which I have dutifully added to my library queue. The line is shorter than it was for the last few books, so with luck I will have it within a few weeks.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: Skye, Bear McCreary

Do you know what book cycled REALLY QUICKLY through the BPL system? The second Outlander book, Diana Gabaldon's Dragonfly in Amber. When I put it on hold after finishing Outlander in April, I was like number 70-something in the queue. I got the book from the library in sort-of-late May and finished it June 2. (Yeah, so I'm behind on reviews.)

In this one, Claire and Jamie go to France to try and stop Charles Stuart's disastrously ill-conceived rebellion against the British crown from ever happening. Obviously, all does not go according to plan, although it might be going according to fate. They take over Jamie's cousin's wine business while he is away on a business trip and ingratiate themselves with the Jacobite factions in France, basically trying to get them to write off Bonnie Prince Charlie as a bad bet and not finance his rebellion.

In addition, Black Jack Randall keeps showing up to be an antagonist, continually finding new and inventive ways to be completely awful to Claire, Jamie, and anyone else who's around. Much of the conflict that crops up between Claire and Jamie is related to Claire's desire that Black Jack not be killed until his child is conceived, so that Frank doesn't get disappeared from the future, and Jamie's quite understandable desire to kill Black Jack immediately before he can ruin anybody else's life.

Around this story there's a fun frame mostly from the POV of Reverend Wakefield's adopted nephew, Roger MacKenzie, who meets a now much-older Claire and her twenty-year-old daughter Brianna in 1968 and begins to piece together what happened to Claire back in 1948. And Roger turns out to have some of his own connections to Claire's story, too.

The first thing that really struck me about this book is that it's bleeding enormous, and I say this as someone who likes bleeding enormous books. But this series is really shaping up to be a big, sprawling, hardcore-everything saga. Major, major upheavals occur a few times per book, and this one seems like at least four books in one--the first 1968 section, the France section, the back in Scotland for the uprising section, and the second 1968 section with its plotline about Geillis Duncan.

I like 'em all, though! And I particularly like Claire as a character, although I still think book-Jamie is much more of a jerk than TV-Jamie. But while book-Jamie is less perfect as a romantic object to me, he's still a very, very interesting character, and I think the book does a solid job of examining the aftermath of what happened to him at the end of Outlander and his attempts to reestablish his sense of self.

While there's definitely bits of this book that could have stood to have been edited down a bit, for the most part I think that there's a hell of a lot going on in these 800 pages. One of the major themes is power--both society-wide and individual--and the effects of having power and being put under the power of others has on people. Another major theme, obviously, is whether or not they can influence history, and while I probably could write a whole review just about the How Does Time Work In This Universe question, I basically refuse to have that conversation ever again, so I'm pretty cool with the fact that nobody in the series so far knows anything about it either. There's court intrigue; there's a lot of medical stuff; there's some weird stuff about magic and occultism; there's a lot of people conflating medical stuff and occultism, as usual. Babies and pregnancy also feature heavily in this one, and not in a sugar-coated way--the book explores issues of reproductive choice and coercion, what lineage/heritage do and don't mean, what it means to be a "real" parent, the emotional toll of miscarriage.

Despite my general inability to care about the sex scenes--of which there are a LOT--I've found myself pretty invested in Claire and Jamie's relationship, and not just as a cross-temporal study. I'm freakin' hooked on this series. It feeds my history dorkery, my morbid cravings for horrendously hardcore-everything drama, my "kickass ladies" comfort zone, basically everything. Hopefully one of these books I'll have the time and drive to sit down and do a full proper review that is pages and pages long and is full of my opinions about specific bits of it, but for right now, that just seems too daunting! It's so daunting it's actually been three weeks since I finished the book and I've been putting off writing a review for it. Bad self.

Man, I have fallen behind on my reviews. These are gonna be a bit short.

About two weeks ago I read Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, because I had been a bad book nerd and watched the television show first, and the television show was awesome. It is about a World War II combat nurse named Claire who accidentally time travels back to eighteenth-century Scotland and drinks a lot and has a romance with a slightly silly, very handsome young Highlander warrior named Jamie. There is a lot of politics and a lot of sex and a lot of drinking and a lot of weird gross medical stuff and very little magic except for the time travel, which, interestingly, seems to be an established thing in that universe, in that there are a lot of stories of women (always women) time-traveling two hundred years away and eventually returning.

The first half of the book I basically knew what was happening, because the TV show thus far has covered it. The second half was all new material, since the second half of the first season of the show doesn’t start for another few weeks. I’m really curious if they’ll keep quite everything the same, since Jamie in the show is a bit nicer and dorkier than Jamie in the books, who is a bit of a jerk, but definitely is more of a jerk in the second half now that he is an eighteenth-century husband. Much of the second half of the book deals at great length with the ethics of beating people, especially dependents, in the context of But It’s The Eighteenth Century. It’s a bit disturbing, not even in the ways that I’m used to romance novel-y crap being disturbing—it’s not glamorized or handwaved away as OK Because It’s Love, but it makes it look reasonable by actually discussing it thoughtfully and with a lot of analysis of responsibilities, power dynamics, and what it is that is supposedly being accomplished. It’s so creepy.

Additionally, the stuff that is supposed to be creepy succeeds spectacularly at being creepy too! Mainly, Black Jack Randall. I can’t actually discuss anything about him here because everything is a giant trigger warning. I will say I am very curious about how a certain thing that happens to him at the end of the book affects the future.

While the book has strong elements of being a romance novel, it’s definitely a good romance novel for people who are me, because it’s packed full of high-intensity stuff-besides-romance, interspersed with actual humor. (God save me from romance that insists upon being dead serious all the time.) This is not to say that the book was without its things-I-experience-as-flaws; it is a very stuff-packed book and it does not skimp on anything, including stuff I’d rather it skimped on. I am the worst at reviewing romances. I’m just like “Ugh, OK, I guess Claire really loves Jamie or whatever, I guess that’s as good a motivation as any… for DARING PRISON BREAKS AND WRESTLING WOLVES WOOO” and then once the wolves are wrestled I’m like “Heartfelt reunion blah blah, is there anything in the world more boring than other people’s boobs, who’s gonna get kidnapped next?” which means my standards for judging a romance are like “How daring were the prison breaks?” I will say, this book has some astoundingly intense prison breaks; they are not for the faint of heart.

I definitely want to read the sequels, but I may reserve them for beach reading.

Current Mood: tired

So, recently, in Adventures of Being a Gothy Cliché, I joined a SF/F meetup group specifically to attend their Halloween party. And then I didn’t like any of the other stuff the meetup group was doing. Until I got a message saying that their book for their December book club was going to be Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog, which has been on my TBR list for a while.
Things I knew about To Say Nothing of the Dog:
1. Its title is a reference to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog), a book I have not read, but which is supposed to be very funny, and is a travel narrative about… well, exactly what it says on the tin: three men in a boat.
2. Somehow it’s a SF/F book despite being based on a Victorian travel narrative. (I thought it was going to be maybe about three men and a dog on a space boat? So unprepared.)
3. ???????
It turns out, To Say Nothing of the Dog is about TIME TRAVEL, which I would have known if I had read the subtitle of the book, which is “(Oxford Time Travel #2)”. I have not read whatever Oxford Time Travel #1 is, but whatever. It is also about THE VICTORIAN ERA, which is one of my favorite eras. Overall, it is a sci-fi, historical fantasy, mystery, comic novel, with a side of romance. So, all the things.
The driving force of the plot of the novel is a formidable and very wealthy American heiress who married into the British peerage and is now known as Lady Schrapnell. Lady Schrapnell is basically funding the entire time travel research department at Oxford in exchange for their help in rebuilding Coventry Cathedral, which was bombed by the Nazis in World War II. Our protagonist, Ned Henry, is an Historian, whose talents are currently being wasted by being sent by Lady Schrapnell to dozens and dozens of local jumble sales throughout history, mostly in the 1940s, trying to observe and take notes on every detail of the Cathedral. One of the items that isn’t quite accounted for is an overdecorated Victorian monstrosity known as “the bishop’s bird stump”—we don’t find out what precisely that is until at least halfway through the book—which had been life-changingly important to one of Lady Schrapnell’s ancestors. The other main driver of the plot is that another Historian, Verity Kindle, accidentally brought a cat through the time-travel net from 1888. Ned comes down with an advanced case of time-lag and is sentenced to two weeks’ rest, which Lady Schrapnell will no way let him get, so the Oxford people send Ned back to 1888 with the cat and tell him to rest in the Victorian countryside. This isn’t really how Ned’s trip to 1888 ends up going; instead, he ends up on a boat with a rambly Oxford undergraduate named Terence, an even more rambly Oxford don named Professor Peddick, and a bulldog named Cyril. Shenanigans ensue, as do incongruities in the space-time continuum, due to the cat. Then there is a lot of stuff about chaos theory and missed trains and penwipers and women’s education and kippers, and a hundred thousand bajilliondy references to literature and history. My favorite bits were when the Historians made Jack the Ripper references and then tried to remember if Jack the Ripper had been active in 1888, because I just read about that in The Invention of Murder, so I knew that he was active in 1888, but in the fall and winter, whereas this novel takes place in June, so not yet. Then I felt smarter than Oxford Historians! I don’t usually feel quite that smart, so it was nice.
Anyway. Ned is a pretty likeable protagonist; he seems to be a pretty competent person generally but he is rather adorably unprepared for the Victorian era, plus he spends half the book with time-lag, which is a pretty funny affliction, at least from the readers’ perspective. (Symptoms include random outbreaks of maudlin poeticalness, Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds, hormone imbalances, and a noise like an air raid siren going off in one’s head.) Ned is also apparently adorable when wearing a boater hat, especially at a jaunty angle. He is very dedicated to doing his job properly and not fucking up the space-time continuum, even when his job devolves into going to lots of mid-twentieth-century jumble sales and buying penwipers, although in that case, he might be committed to doing it properly, but he doesn’t have to like it. Ned’s inner narration makes cursory attempts at seeing where people are coming from, but largely it is just hilariously judgmental.
Verity is also a great character. When she first shows up Ned starts poetically comparing her to a naiad and all that sort of Love At First Sight Due Entirely To Physical Beauty stuff, but this is because he is time-lagged, and therefore both maudlinly poetical and hormonally imbalanced. He specifically compares her to a naiad because she is all wet after jumping into the Thames to save the cat. Verity has actually been prepped for the Victorian era, so she saves Ned’s bacon on propriety things on a number of occasions; she is also presented as a perfectly competent and intelligent Historian who is just a bit out of her depth in the overwhelming amount of wacky that is this book’s plot. I also like that her characterization isn’t static; she is usually pretty poised and polite, as she would have to be to pass as a respectable young Victorian woman, but going on “drops” (i.e. time-traveling) makes her sort of talkative and giddy and then she eats all of Ned’s food. I cannot remember the last time I read a book where a female character was allowed to babble and eat other people’s food and was still treated seriously. Verity has also spent a lot of time in the 1930s, which she claims was fantastically boring, as there was nothing to do except read mystery novels, so she brings a lot of fun mystery genre-savvy to the book. Just because it bears repeating: Verity gets to talk a lot about goofy shit like mystery novels, but she is still treated as a serious, intelligent, and competent character. I would like more characters like Verity, please.
I would happily ramble about To Say Nothing of the Dog all day, but I’m not sure how much sense it would make to anyone reading this who hasn’t read the book already, because it’s a very strange and complicated novel. It clocks in at nearly five hundred pages, which is extremely long for a comic novel, because it has to cram in as many jokes about cats and chaos theory and kippers as humanly possible. Every page of it is extremely well-researched and deliriously silly. I strongly recommend it to anyone who likes time travel narratives, chaos theory, nineteenth century nonsense, historical tidbits, saucy fictional cats, lowbrow but highly educated humor (think Monty Python), and British stuff. In fact, I would strongly advise against reading it unless you are moderately familiar with British literature and history, or you may spend the whole book looking stuff up on Wikipedia.

So last year I read Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches, which is a paranormal romance about a witch and a vampire who fall in love and do wacky research about supernatural genetics and alchemy. The sequel came out last week, and I wanted to read it enough that I was willing to shell out the fifteen dollars that it costs ON KINDLE because fucking Amazon.

Anyway. It was very good, although, due to the generally impressive level of historical and linguistic research, I was extra annoyed on the few occasions I found things to nitpick (or at least thought I found to nitpick) that were not satisfactorily explained, the main one being the same thing that drove me up the wall last time, which is Matthew's insistence upon having an English first name even when he is having French middle and last names. Apparently, we get exactly one reference to the fact that "Matthew" has an alternate form in French per book. I do not understand why. We spend more time hearing Matthew being called "Matthaios" in this book than "Mathieu," even though Vampire Matthew (I now just call him Vampire Matthew because I don't want to deal with all the names) is not Greek at all, but Philippe is super pretentious and he will call Matthew by any goddamn name he wants to matter what language we're speaking.

...It bugs me as much as it does because the rest of the language stuff in the book is so good. Miraculously, Diana's German is about the same level of rudimentary as mine, so every time German shows up I am about as confused as she is! It is awesome. And there are fun and accurate smatterings of a whole ton of other languages scattered throughout the book, which makes me super happy.

So, at the end of the last book, we found out Diana was a timewalker, and she and Vampire Matthew were preparing to timewalk to Elizabethan England and find Diana a witch to help her figure out her magic powers now that she is not spellbound anymore, and to hunt down the elusive, enchanted alchemical manuscript Ashmole 782, and hopefully eventually solve Diana's parents' murder. This book kicks off by timewalking to Matthew's Old Lodge in 1590. The first half of the book is a little slow plotwise, with occasional unsuccessful forays into trying to find Diana a witch to teach her and little mention of Ashmole 782. Most of the plot in the first half is dedicated to further developing Diana and Matthew's romance, which readers who care about that sort of thing might like a bit more than I did (I used up all my ability to give a shit about people's brooding, guilt-ridden, possessive vampire boyfriends several years ago). If you are not super invested in the romance, it is helpful to be super invested in learning all sorts of crazy shit about Elizabethan England and whatever else the author feels like showing off that she researched, because, like in all of the bestest time-travel stories, Diana has Ye Olde Culture Shocke, and spends a lot of time adjusting to life in early modern Europe at great length and in great detail. Diana, being a historian, basically treats the first several months of time travel as one enormous hands-on research project, learning how to run a large, upper-class sixteenth-century French manor household. (They travel to Sept-Tours. Which is in France. Everyone speaks a lot of French. Everyone calls Matthew either "Matthew" or "Matthaios" and... yes, this irritates me a lot.) They also get married again (this is the third time; in the first book they do a neopagan handfasting and a modern French common-law marriage) at Sept-Tours, so that the author can show off just how many marriage customs she has researched, and also they spend the entire winter there, so we can learn about all the early-modern French harvest and winter rituals and celebrations. It is incredibly fascinating if you don't mind that the plot is barely moving forward at all.

In the second half of the book, we get back on the quest for witch mentors and Ashmole 782, and hang out with bunches of historical figures, some of whom turn out to be actually not human (and some of whom are really annoying, I am looking at you, daemon Kit Marlowe). We chase Ashmole 782 to Prague, because Prague is big in modern gothic novels (it is apparently very sexy), to the court of a lecherous Hapsburg king who is not very bright and is massively petulant, and there is all sorts of douchey court-drama power-playing, which I love (note: I would have been totally eaten alive in any aristocratic court ever. I could never pull that shit off; I'm not quick enough. I think that is why I like reading about it so much).

I don't really want to talk about the alchemy-related plot twists that show up because it is spoilery and pretty much some of the awesomest stuff in the book, and also I'd probably fuck it up. But let's just say I'm really hoping the third book spends a LOT more time on alchemy and Ashmole 782 and less time on history fun facts, even though I like history fun facts.

Also, in this book, Diana spends more time being awesome and snarky and less time being fed tea and eggs and freaking out about stuff, so that is an improvement. There are some real attempts to deal with the "vampires are possessive like whoa" part of the vampire myth without just glamorizing possessiveness as super sexy and not abusive at all, so +1 for feministiness, although I still think that I would never be able to be a vampire romance heroine. Also, there is an awkwardly meta conversation about the trashiness of modern vampire novels, which beats the usual habit of treating the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie as the most modern iteration of the vampire myth to compare everything to, but at the same time comes off a little bit as being "Look, my book is better than all the other vampire romances, see how I can criticize them!" and then I am like "Oh, go find Ashmole 782 already, Jesus Christ."

Also, due to time travel, BONUS VISIT FROM DIANA'S DAD. And of course, bonus weddings conducted by Matthew's dad. Maybe the third book will have more stuff about both of their moms? I love stories about moms.

Overall, I thought this book was very good, although I admit I made fun of it through almost the whole thing, because that is how I roll with vampires these days.