bookpost august

09 Nov, 2024

Yes I have had this in the drafts for like 3 months. Don't worry about it.

too like the lightning, by ada palmer

conspiratorial, near future utopian earth scifi melodrama

My groupchat's review of my posts about this book: 'they need to print these bite proof huh'. Liferuining. This'll be long - I started writing this several chapters into book 3 of 4, so it really covers book 2, too.

I can't remember where I came across Too Like The Lightning. It might have been in the SA Sci-fi book thread somewhere? I posted a link to the wiki page tagged 'might read this' in the gc, and forgot about it until I ended up thumbing through the sci-fi section of a local library, recognised the title, and took it home. My only real preconceptions were that it was Gender Sci-fi by a Professor of Renaissance Studies, which sounded like a good time. An interesting perspective, at least. anyway i got beaten over the head with a fucking brick

I'd love to write about the actual content of the book but first I have to be upfront: this shit is completely feeding the fujo violence in me. I need to throttle Mycroft Canner with my own two hands. this is, in a way, a significant point of the book, but i'm not sure if ms palmer meant for it to have arisen from the fujoshi inclination towards exaggerated brutality. All my liveblogs were variations on 'can you the fuck up dude i hate you' and 'what is WRONG with you?? die???'. internal dialogue of saras watching Mycroft skulk around "Wow id love to break its legs" "Lets see it withstand the burden of the Cross

Anyway, the book itself. It's set in a post-religion, post-gender, post-nuclear family, post-geographic nation future that posits that theology will become intensely personal and private; gender archaic and useless; and in a world where a global round trip is <4hr, the family and culture and system of governance one belongs to should be a personal choice - and these become the primary public-facing social group signifiers people use instead of our religion/gender/race. I think it's pretty cool, and despite some of the 'Hives' being a bit kooky ¹ , it quite avoids feeling like YA-style fandom-inducing factions - these are not governments for you to project yourself onto and discuss with your peers. (Although I think the hive _Uniforms are a bit crap. Can't blame it for not wrestling with the future of fashion as well as the rest of it.)

Plot ties together the political theft of a highly influential world power yearly ranking list + an off-the-grid child who appears to have the power of miracles, as told by an unreliable narrator documenting this turning point in history, with unfettered access to both this kid and world leaders. It's a fine plot, but I struggled to grasp the setting's politics for a long chunk of the book (it really frontloads nouns. book that would benefit from having a notepad near it), so I spent the first book mostly focused on the general worldbuilding (cool, as established) and character dynamics (fucking bewildering).

I was enjoying the conspiracy thread in a more general sense. It namedrops the French Enlightenment a lot and I think smart people who know what that means tend to dislike it for being contradictory to its sources and internally or whatever. I don't really care. It's Metal Gear to me. It's over the top melodrama. It spends hundreds of thousands of words trying to convince you that learning a character's spiritual beliefs is the most shocking thing possible, and despite thinking it's also really funny to have a Catholic* Reveal, I think it manages it. It's persuasive, it's easy to get swept up in.

I don't know if it'd like it less if I knew more about it going in. I kind of doubt it'll fit Gender Considerers - people expecting a Left Hand of Darkness, an Imperial Radch aren't going to get that here. The entire framing is deliberately, confrontationally unprogressive, even. Deprogressive? World's first book with a 100% misgendering rate. Sure, the world is gender neutral, and the majority of characters are some kind of bisexual with either same-gender or same-sex partners (yes), but there is little in the way of capital q-Queer liberation in here. That stuff's already done! It's over! It reminds me most of that comic of the queer person asking their cishet parents how many genders there should be and they get the answers 'none' and 'idk maybe 10'. I'm a pronoun haver who went into this interested in more gender sci-fi and still liked what it was putting down, though. Not to say it's ill-considered or offensive or, like, Painfully Cis, it just has little in common with current discourses.

And... I don't even know if it'll hit fellow fujos the same way it did me, because multiple themes, scenes, dynamics in this did remind me of my (retching noise) OTP.

I guess I'm just a real sucker for an unpleasant, combative narrator. Mycroft is a desperate piece of shit, begging the reader to understand that all his worst traits and decisions are on purpose, constantly trying to fend off and pacify imaginary readers yelling at him for being an offensive, biased source. The slow and gradual reveal of his specific idiosyncrasies, the way characters react to him, it's all very engaging. He's disgusting, fascinating, a real crybaby. I want to torture him in a shipping container.

seven surrenders, by ada palmer

book 2 of the above

>INSANELY FUCKABLE DOMINEERING VILLAIN >TONSURE REVEAL

ancillary justice, by ann leckie

it's more gender scifi but this one's actually set in space

Okay this made me less insane so I can write about it normally. It came highly recommended I picked it up while waiting for my copy of Terra Ignota book 3 to transfer libraries. They're both gender sci-fi but this is more traditional science fiction than whatever Ms Palmer was cooking. Spaceships, alien planets, laser guns, colonialism. There's a lot at the start - in the ice fields - that feels homaging to The Left Hand of Darkness.

Despite reminding me of a book I like a lot, it took a while for it to settle in for me. Breq is a distant narrator, and although I knew this is deliberate and appreciated it, I HAD just come off listening to Mycroft cast berserk directly on me for 2 whole hardbacks. Still - the way the world and Breq's relationships with others and herself progress are very good, and it does a lot of very powerful storytelling in absentia. The things Breq doesn't tell the reader are as useful as what she does. That makes it sound like a harder read than it is, but I think it's really obvious when Breq spends literally 2 pages describing the years she spent on an alien planet getting rich and discovering God because it's just not about that right now.

Also... I don't want to Engage with Miscellaneous Opinions on the Internet, but I saw people feel... let down, by the gender in it? Citizens of the Radch default to she/her for everyone, so Breq finds it difficult to gender people 'correctly' (i.e., cis) when she's trying to pretend to not be a Radchaai spaceship hivemind. I think it serves good purpose. It's on a surface level an extremely basic 'wot if it were woman' attack on male centering, it works to other the Radch - to enforce their cultural norms on all the planets they annex - and more personally serves to other Breq from her peers in that ND 'basic social signals are both useless and confusing to me' way. It's an easy way to get in the head of a nonhuman with an abstracted relationship to the body. Little to do with femininity and more to do with social roles and language. In that respect the Radch could have easily gone for nongendered pronouns, but I think it's important that Breq gets it wrong in like, a social sense that you as a reader would consider effortless, easy. If you have she/her, you must understand Women, so you must also have he/him, so why is it hard for you, Breq?
I think, also, it is a dialogue with the Le Guin it clearly admires. LHOD uses he/him for all its differently-gendered characters, and I would guess that most readers subconsciously build masculine figures in their head unless explicitly given body or gender descriptors. I know I did,

Anyway I haven't gotten to book 2 yet but I'm looking forward to it. It's good. I really liked the ending, I think it ramped up to stressful impressively with its narrator's limited emotional tools.

it kept making me want to play morrowind. dunmer house ass

Currently Unfinished:

the king in yellow, by robert w. chambers

classic short stories. what if reading a book made you crazy

started reading this while waiting for other books to come in. pretty cool. wot if a book made you crazy. not much else to say. not a drop, but i feel discouraged about finishing it because i know it gets less fucked up in the end