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vcmwOk, this has been a nice weekend. Tomorrow I work my morning and afternoon jobs, and J. has the day off, so nothing productive will probably happen. I have to write a thing I've been dreading for a review of a professor I loved at undergrad before bed tonight, and I've been putting it off and off... too much emotional involvement, no distance. So meh.
I pounded through Elizabeth Bear's Carnival this afternoon, and read Blood and Iron at the start of the weekend. During last weekend I read Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. So since it's all compressed I think I'm responding to the works in relation to each other more than in relation to other things.
What jumps out at me after finishing Carnival is that in many ways its a mirror-image continuation of the story in Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. At the end of those three books there's a certain technological solution to a problem (but an essentially humanistic technical solution, as it involves AI). At the beginning of Carnival, you're confronted with the unpleasant social effects of a mechanistic version of the same technological fix that is much of the conclusion of Worldwired. That is, if the problem of Worldwired were fixed without AI, but with intelligent computers that weren't sentient and didn't have morality, you'd get, in time, the world of Earth that starts out Carnival. Kii and his dragons are the correspondent to the weird aliens of the other three books, except here what the humans have to offer the aliens is individuality and change, rather than language (but those are certainly related tools).
Carnival is a much easier read, I think because it stops and starts in more comfortable places. I remember reading somewhere that the difference between tragedy and comedy is where you stop the story. In both the Jenny books and Blood and Iron one of the uncomfortable and interesting things was how often the story continued after an upbeat stopping point to explore the negative consequences of each solution that allows escape.
This was very difficult for me to read, as a large part of what I read fiction for is that sense of catharsis that comes as we tag along with the protagonist to that place where the difficulties mount and are insoluble with the available tools/materials/knowledge, and then suddenly the mechanism of the fantastic comes into play. And a really skillful author manipulates it so it doesn't seem *totally* like a deus ex machina, and then all of that tension is resolved in a positive manner - the character pops through some realization/power/loyalty/problem, and there's an answer where no answer could be before, and the answer is grasped. And a happy ending is where you stop RIGHT THERE, before reader or author can start exploring the new problems that this new answer necessitates - in Hegelian terms, you stop at synthesis, and don't move forward to the fact that the synthesis is its own new thesis, if I've got my second hand understanding of that process right.
The first four of Ms. Bear's novels I read worked really hard to deny the reader any sense of that happy ending - there was catharsis, but there was an insistence on the brute insolvability that is existence as a flow rather than an episode.
Carnival is also a lot more limited in its time/place variance than any of the books, which made the narrative flow a lot smoother and faster for me. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
And I hope I can be pardoned for thinking that as feminism gets some real work done in our culture, we're seeing an accompanying mellowing in feminist dystopias. While I wouldn't want me or anyone I cared for living in New Amazonia, probably, it's still a lot less creepy and stultifying than the societies in Suzy McKee Charnas's series (women forced to breed in pits and eat their own babies and their dead, anyone, with the fun alternative of getting to have painful sex with horses in order to reproduce by cloning?). Or than the scary one with the iron-teethed lady warrior and the brain-stem crippled monkey/human sex-bots in the creepiest bits of Russ's The Female Man.
Wow, this is all far more theoretical than critical, which is my tendency. In sum I thought it was fast paced and smart and well-characterized, and I actually liked all the characters, especially the way all their choices seemed to flow inevitably from their situations. The aliens were cool, in their own strange way, and there's a really keen moment in which *all* the humans recoil from the otherness of a certain aspect of the aliens society (which threw up echoes of Piers Anthony's creepy-as-heck story from the Dangerous Visions anthos, and also the aforementioned Suzy McKee Charnas books, but was still its own original creepy bit, and the twist I most hadn't seen coming in the story). I thought that was extra good, because until that very moment the alien is one of the most sympathetic, easy to empathize with characters, and then suddenly *pop* it isn't, at all. Neat trick.
I pounded through Elizabeth Bear's Carnival this afternoon, and read Blood and Iron at the start of the weekend. During last weekend I read Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. So since it's all compressed I think I'm responding to the works in relation to each other more than in relation to other things.
What jumps out at me after finishing Carnival is that in many ways its a mirror-image continuation of the story in Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. At the end of those three books there's a certain technological solution to a problem (but an essentially humanistic technical solution, as it involves AI). At the beginning of Carnival, you're confronted with the unpleasant social effects of a mechanistic version of the same technological fix that is much of the conclusion of Worldwired. That is, if the problem of Worldwired were fixed without AI, but with intelligent computers that weren't sentient and didn't have morality, you'd get, in time, the world of Earth that starts out Carnival. Kii and his dragons are the correspondent to the weird aliens of the other three books, except here what the humans have to offer the aliens is individuality and change, rather than language (but those are certainly related tools).
Carnival is a much easier read, I think because it stops and starts in more comfortable places. I remember reading somewhere that the difference between tragedy and comedy is where you stop the story. In both the Jenny books and Blood and Iron one of the uncomfortable and interesting things was how often the story continued after an upbeat stopping point to explore the negative consequences of each solution that allows escape.
This was very difficult for me to read, as a large part of what I read fiction for is that sense of catharsis that comes as we tag along with the protagonist to that place where the difficulties mount and are insoluble with the available tools/materials/knowledge, and then suddenly the mechanism of the fantastic comes into play. And a really skillful author manipulates it so it doesn't seem *totally* like a deus ex machina, and then all of that tension is resolved in a positive manner - the character pops through some realization/power/loyalty/problem, and there's an answer where no answer could be before, and the answer is grasped. And a happy ending is where you stop RIGHT THERE, before reader or author can start exploring the new problems that this new answer necessitates - in Hegelian terms, you stop at synthesis, and don't move forward to the fact that the synthesis is its own new thesis, if I've got my second hand understanding of that process right.
The first four of Ms. Bear's novels I read worked really hard to deny the reader any sense of that happy ending - there was catharsis, but there was an insistence on the brute insolvability that is existence as a flow rather than an episode.
Carnival is also a lot more limited in its time/place variance than any of the books, which made the narrative flow a lot smoother and faster for me. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
And I hope I can be pardoned for thinking that as feminism gets some real work done in our culture, we're seeing an accompanying mellowing in feminist dystopias. While I wouldn't want me or anyone I cared for living in New Amazonia, probably, it's still a lot less creepy and stultifying than the societies in Suzy McKee Charnas's series (women forced to breed in pits and eat their own babies and their dead, anyone, with the fun alternative of getting to have painful sex with horses in order to reproduce by cloning?). Or than the scary one with the iron-teethed lady warrior and the brain-stem crippled monkey/human sex-bots in the creepiest bits of Russ's The Female Man.
Wow, this is all far more theoretical than critical, which is my tendency. In sum I thought it was fast paced and smart and well-characterized, and I actually liked all the characters, especially the way all their choices seemed to flow inevitably from their situations. The aliens were cool, in their own strange way, and there's a really keen moment in which *all* the humans recoil from the otherness of a certain aspect of the aliens society (which threw up echoes of Piers Anthony's creepy-as-heck story from the Dangerous Visions anthos, and also the aforementioned Suzy McKee Charnas books, but was still its own original creepy bit, and the twist I most hadn't seen coming in the story). I thought that was extra good, because until that very moment the alien is one of the most sympathetic, easy to empathize with characters, and then suddenly *pop* it isn't, at all. Neat trick.
