randy_byers | Entries tagged with books

I was reading Sarah Tolmie's fantasy novel, The Stone Boatman, when

ron_drummond visited in May, and I waxed sufficiently enthusiastic about it to him that he found and gave me a copy of her other book, Trio, while he was here. Trio is nothing like The Stone Boatman other than in exhibiting the sensibility of a poet. As the jacket copy has it: "A collection of 120 sonnets in eight parts, Trio reveals, frame by frame, a married fortysomething female narrator in love with two younger men -- an intellectual and a dancer -- and torn between the claims of the body and mind."

I remember one of the poems revealing that the narrator/poet was in her 40s, but while I'm also pretty certain that the poems mention that she's in love with more than one man, I don't know that I could have figured out that one was a dancer and the other an intellectual, or, for that matter, that she was married to a third. In one of the poems, as I recall, the narrator/poet explicitly says she has kept the identities of everyone (including herself) ambiguous, if not confused, perhaps so that the reader could identify with all of them. To be honest, I almost gave up on the book very early on, because I found it almost inherently precious and coy, and I wasn't sure I was prepared to read a lot of impassioned poetry about love and sex at this particular juncture in my life. I have read another sonnet sequence -- Love, Death, and the Changing of the Season by Marilyn Hacker -- about the rise and fall of a lesbian love affair, so it's not that the sonnet sequence is repulsive to me as a form of literature. I'm not particularly well-read when it comes to poetry, but neither am I completely helpless.

What kept me going with Trio was the way that Tolmie flipped the gender script in a number of powerful ways. First she made the male body the vulnerable object of specifically female desire. (In Hacker's sequence, the female body was still the object of desire, even if the desiring subject was also a woman.) Tolmie also gives her female narrator/poet a sexual swagger and self-confidence that sometimes becomes mocking or condescending toward her male lovers. I found this irritating, and I was fascinated by my own irritation. Was it a purely defensive reaction? (My guess is that the answer is probably, "Yes.") The way that Tolmie made the female in the threesome -- foursome? I'm not sure whether the husband is the subject of any of the sonnets -- the figure of power and judgment and conquest was very unusual in my experience, and she earned my respect with her stance.

It took me a long time to read all 120 sonnets. Reading poetry is just a lot more work than reading most prose. I didn't reread or give a close reading to all the sonnets, but the ones that captured my attention got more of my time and energy. Again, I'm no expert on poetry, and I can't say I picked up on the over all clusters of imagery. (Karen Burnham's review at Strange Horizons strikes me as astute regarding how the poetry works, and she also points out that the narrator has two children, which is another detail I completely missed, along with the husband. Argh!) Anyway, I was also going to point out that Tolmie uses a lot of internal rhyme or near-rhyme, but it doesn't preclude the more typical couplets of sonnets. Here's one of the sonnets that I liked the best, to give you a taste of her poetry:

The love of a poet is a bullet.
Who can you ask to take it? You could not.
Can't bear the searchlight's glare, the ripping stare,
Admixture of what's wanted and what's there,
Compressed into a foreign object lodged
In the brain. Invasive love: it causes pain.
People flee it without knowing what it means,
Instinctually. The bloodied shell, falling
From its graze, carries a payload of
The DNA, fine, clean, a better print
Than the original. Such is the hell
Of the beloved, unable to tell
What he might have been, unimpeded,
Unenhanced, out of the pathway of her glance.

I particularly like how she follows the hell/tell couplet with the internal rhyme of "unenhanced" and "her glance". On the other hand I'm not sure I fully understand the metaphor of the shell. First of all I wonder if she means the slug rather than the shell, since a shell wouldn't graze what's shot at typically. Also if the slug is a load of DNA, isn't that an image of sperm? Or does she mean an ovum? Or is she talking about how the poet creates an image of the beloved that's superior to the original? I guess the latter makes the most sense: the image of beloved perfection created by the poet can become a painful form of distortion, something the real person can't possibly live up to. Blood is thinner than poetry? (She meditates in another sonnet -- one of the swaggering ones -- on how her poetry is making her lovers immortal.)

No, I'm not exactly sure why it has taken me so long to get to the Xenogenesis Trilogy. I guess I disliked Butler's first novel, Patternmaster, enough that it took me forty years to get back to her, despite all the acclaim, including a McArthur Foundation Genius Award, in the intervening years. Well, my loss. This is a great book, initially published as three separate novels called Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). In the future (I don't think Butler specifies how far in the future) a starfaring alien race called the Oankali discover an Earth which has been devastated by a nuclear war between the US and USSR. Most humans and other kinds of animal life are gone or severely damaged. The Oankali "rescue" what life remains on the planet and begins to restore the planet to its antebellum state, mostly in the southern hemisphere where the war had less direct impact.

Meanwhile the surviving humans have been brought aboard the Oankali starships. Over a period of centuries the Oankali attempt to learn how to communicate with the humans and to prevent them from killing themselves when they realize that they are now essentially the slaves and study subjects of an alien race. Eventually we are introduced to a woman whose name is very eventually given as Lilith with whom an Oankali of the ooloi gender (the Oankali have three genders: male, female, and ooloi) finally establishes a relationship. The ooloi begins to teach her (and us) about the Oankali and the plans they have for humanity. What they want from Lilith is somebody to help wake up more humans and acclimatize them to their situation.

What we learn about the Oankali is that they consider themselves genetic traders. They travel the stars looking for interesting genesets that they can appropriate to mix with their own ever-changing geneset, although they do have one starship dedicated to Oankali of the geneset they had on their home planet. The ooloi gender is a kind of genetic engineer. They can store genetic information in memory and in an organ that they use for collecting cells from organisms they encounter. When they mate with males and females, they take genes from all three mates (or more, if there are more) and mix them into a new pattern with an optimum outcome in mind. That's what their gender does. They are also capable of fixing genetic problems that lead to disease, but when they discover cancer in humans they consider it not just a problem but, once properly understood, the key to beneficial side-effects such as being able regenerate lost limbs and organs. The Oankali are very excited about the possibilities inherent in cancer.

The ooloi, and I guess the Oankali in general, can also physically merge with other living organisms and can directly stimulate a nervous system, if there is one. One of the things the book explores is the idea of consent, and what it means when a) the being you are consenting to can correct your genetic flaws and make you stronger and healthier, and b) the being you are consenting to can make you feel pleasure greater than any you've experienced in any other way through direct stimulation of your nervous system. The ooloi are capable of understanding your desires on a direct biochemical/neurological level, and within the context of the novel they often understand what an individual human wants better than the individual understands themselves. So is it rape if the ooloi perceives that the human really does crave the level of pleasure the ooloi can provide, even if the desire causes conflict on the conscious level with the desire to be autonomous?

Butler maintains an uncomfortable ambiguity on the question as she slowly explores Oankali culture and humanity's various reactions to it. There's never any doubt that humanity's choices are limited by the Oankali, but as the Oankali merge the genesets of the two species, the resulting new species is more sympathetic to humanity's stubborn resistance to total co-optation. It's also more adept at overcoming that resistance by offering humans the things they truly desire. Are they in fact better at enslaving humans? It remains an open question.

There's a lot going on in this book. It's a novel of ideas that explores gender, sexuality, reproduction, genetic engineering, free will, consensuality, appropriation. Butler is not a literary writer, and her prose is very plain and direct. What she does, however, is follow her premises deep into their own internal logic, which gives them the dreamlike feel of being truly lived in, truly living. The Oankali world seems to unfurl according to its own reality. We start to feel what an ooloi wants, what it craves, and that begins to shift our ideas about what male and female mean. In a way, the focus of the novel is what it would mean for humanity to have an ooloi gender as part of its reproductive process.

But it's a lot more than that. I started off feeling that I'd never read anything like it, and it's true that Butler has achieved something unique here. She has carved out a niche that will no doubt keep her name alive in the field for a very long time. However, early on the Oankali preference for symbiotic organic technology (e.g. living space ships and suspended animation modules) reminded me of Varley's Nine Worlds and Gaia stories. The way that humans are transformed into something deeply, weirdly alien by their encounter with the Oankali reminded me of Cherryh's 40,000 in Gehenna.

Also similar to Cherryh is the way that sex and rape are uncomfortably intertwined. It's impossible to say that the Oankali aren't raping humanity, but it's equally impossible to say that they aren't learning through the process how to give humanity what they really want, which is the freedom to choose their own path, even if it only leads back to self-destruction. There's no simple morality to be derived from the story, as far as I can tell. There's a sense that rape and perhaps enslavement are inevitable and that all you can do is deal with the consequences the best you can.

Let me start of by recommending that you read Abigail Nussbaum's review of this novel at Strange Horizons, because I think she understands what Samatar is up to far better than I do. In particular, I can't do any better than her concluding comments: "There is too much here to sum up, and the book contains its own contradictions. Almost every statement that it makes—about fantasy, about gender, about identity, about language—is contradicted elsewhere. This is, perhaps, to be expected from a story about the insufficiency of stories, whose characters find their freedom by refusing to be characters anymore. So it’s perhaps inevitable that one would finish this novel feeling both thoroughly satisfied and eager for more, desperate to talk about it and convinced that it can’t be properly discussed. It is—and this, again, comes as no surprise—a major and important work of modern fantasy, and also a meditation on how fantasy is, perhaps, insufficient for all that we want to say."

With this as preface, let me back up a moment and say that I reread Samatar's first novel, A Stranger in Olondriaa, in preparation for reading The Winged Histories, which is not a sequel or prequel but is set in the same secondary world. I loved A Stranger in Olondria just as much the second time as I did the first time; it instantly became one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time. I found The Winged Histories much more difficult, even as I enjoyed very much re-immersing myself in this invented world, with its ornate history full of surprising nooks and crannies, and also in Samatar's sensuous, poetic prose, full of taste, smell, and tactility. Her characters also remain sharply drawn and complicated in very human ways. A Stanger in Olondria is a more focused story, with a single central narrator, although his narrative does come to include the narratives of two other important characters, both women, one of whom is also a narrator in The Winged Histories.

At the end of A Stranger in Olondria, a religious war breaks out between the followers of the orgiastic cult of Avalei and what I described in my review as the more penitential cult of the Stone. The Winged Histories is more or less about that war, but it complicates it by connecting it to a history of political empire-building in Olondria which is essentially a struggle for power between three different ethnic groups whose main point of commonality is that they all speak the Olondrian language. There are four narrators of The Winged Histories, all of whom get their own chapter. Part of what I found difficult about the novel is that I couldn't keep the history straight, and beyond the three cousins at the center of the power struggle in the current war, I couldn't follow the references to members of older generations and their relationships with each other, despite the family tree provided at the front.

It also doesn't help that within each chapter, the narrative seems to be constantly shifting forward and backward in time and breaking into fragments of language (often Oldondrian or other invented languages of the secondary world) that echo and recur in a lyrical way but weren't clearly linked otherwise in my mind, leaving me feeling lost much of the time unless the stories being related in the fragments were about the three cousins. Fortunately three of the chapters are narrated either by one of the cousins or by a lover of one of the cousins (all four narrators, by the way, are women), so other than the one orphan chapter from the point of view the forlorn priestess of the Stone, Tialon, whom we also meet in A Stranger in Olondria, most of the book was actually more focused than I sometimes felt it was. It does build to a climax as well, where the story of the three cousins comes to a kind of resolution, albeit and ambiguous one.

Anyway, Abigail Nussbaum was obviously able to follow the story better than I was, so my problems with it may be a reflection of my current state of mental disability. One thing Samatar does here that I found fascinating is to create a mythology of monsters in the prehistory of Olondria, which appear to be a typically rationalizing Just-So story for a conquering people who want to claim that they brought civilization to a world of uncontrollable barbarity in legendary times. Samatar is doing something more similar to Tolkien in creating her own mythology and languages, but whereas Tolkien is ultimately pretty clear that the stories in the Middle Earth mythology are true, Samatar is more coy and only at the end reveals that the mythology refers to something real. It's quite a spectacular transformation when it happens, in more ways than one. As Nussbaum indicates, however, there's an overarching sense in the book that words don't suffice, so the apocalyptic finale felt strangely unsatisfactory, unlike the perhaps more romantic ending of A Stranger in Olondria. Actually, both novels end with a tragic realization that love, like words, doesn't suffice, although we can't help but try to express ourselves through them anyway, so maybe the two books are less different than I thought.

Whatever the case, Samatar remains a fascinating writer who uses words in ways unlike any other contemporary writer I can think of. She's a unique voice in the modern fantasy field, challenging herself, the genre, and her readers with a complex literary sensibility that resists genre conventions. The Winged Histories didn't seem quite as successful as her first novel to me, but there was plenty of pleasure in the reading of it and exploring more of Olondria.

I admit to feeling a special kinship with Samatar, because her mother was Mennonite (her father was a Somali Muslim), she grew up in Indiana, where I was born because my dad was attending Goshen Mennonite College, which is where Samatar got her own undergraduate degree. (My sister attended Goshen College as well.) Her next book is said to be about Mennonites who immigrated from Russia to Uzbekistan in the 17th century. Sounds fascinating to me, and I really hope I get a chance to read it.

I picked up this fantasy novel at the last Seattle Potlatch on

voidampersand's recommendation, and I didn't know much about it or the author before I started reading it. Within a few pages I looked the author up to confirm my suspicion that she was a poet. She writes prose like a poet: spare, careful, precise, and a little precious. The imagery is strong, and everything feels highly symbolic and subtly ornate.

The thing that makes this novel stand out is the highly original nature of the world it's set in. It's not remotely like generic Fantasyland, and it's not really like any other fantasy world I've read about, although there are aspects of it that reminded me of Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria. Part of this similarity might by stylistic too, since Samatar is also a poet writing a fantasy novel, but part of it is just how different the imaginary worlds are from anything else I've encountered. I've seen The Stone Boatmen compared to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels too, but I have to say that I didn't see it myself. But what I was going to say on this point was that it also strikes me as poetic, in the sense that poems are often about themselves and their own uniqueness. It's almost avant garde in the way it tries to avoid being generic, and yet it also avoids the incoherence that avant garde works can suffer from their lack of connection to anything familiar, at least for an audience unattuned to their individualistic meaning.

Anyway, it's a little difficult to summarize what The Stone Boatmen is about. It's about three cities that are all across oceans from each other and long out of contact although all were founded by the same civilization. One city specializes in rituals, one in poetry, and one in visions, and the deep matter of the story is how each of these things is a type of pattern-finding or meaning-communication. It's a multigenerational novel, with almost every chapter being about a new character who is a descendant of the characters in the previous chapters. It goes at least five generations deep, maybe six. If the story does have a similarity to standard fantasies it's in the way that it's mostly about the aristocracy. In the beginning a ruling family marries into a lower class fishing family, but after that all the characters are from the upper class, with basically unlimited resources to pursue their talents.

All the characters have talents, mostly falling into the three foci of the three cities. Another way that The Stone Boatmen makes me think of Samatar's novel is that both take religion seriously. In The Stone Boatmen this comes in the form of both ritual and vision. Perhaps the poetry functions as a kind of sacrament too. There is no overt religion with a church and gods, however, unlike in Samatar. (There are priests, but no theology to speak of.) Tolmie seems to be trying to tie everything together in the final chapter, but I confess that I'm not sure I understood her argument. It may have been an attempt to rationalize the visions of the future and the deep past that some of the characters experience in terms of pattern-finding. There are a number of twins in the story, and the final seer, Fjorel, observes that they are both identical and yet unique, and that this is true of classes of things in general. She has a revelation about this that may amount to realizing that the similarity of things is true through time, and this allows us to see into the past and the future. However, as I say, I'm not at all sure I understood the revelation.

This is also a non-genre story in the way that nothing much happens. There are adventures of a type, but not much in the way of swashbuckling. Characters and their relationships change, sometimes surprisingly, but it's not really a story of character either. Ultimately it's a story of discovery and ideas, and while I found it a little slow-going at times, I really appreciated the attention to detail and the strangeness of the whole endeavor. The uniqueness of the world is reason enough for the visit.

First of all I want to mention that, in the interests of cutting down on the amount of stuff I have to get rid of later, I read the Kindle edition of Downbelow Station, and I was surprised by how many typos there were. Not sure why it would surprise me that an ebook has so many typos, but I guess I just assume it would be easier to fix in that format.

Anyway, when I read this Hugo-winning novel for the first time back in the '90s, I didn't care for it much. It didn't feel much like science fiction to me, and it still didn't the second time through. Why it doesn't feel like SF is a bit of a puzzle, because it's set on a space station orbiting an alien planet, with a space war raging around it. I guess I'd say it reads like a blockbuster best-seller, by which I mean it's got a huge cast of characters that we move between from chapter to chapter, weaving the story from multiple points of view in epic fashion. I know that's not the deepest analysis, but it just feels like a generic blockbuster novel to me. It's a military story in a science fiction setting, and the military and political intrigue overwhelm the science fictional world-building, to my mind.

It opens with a big wodge of exposition about how Earth gradually started exploring the nearby stars and establishing a trade network mostly via space stations established in orbit around the nearer stars. Well, as I think I said in my review of Merchanter's Luck, I find the concept of interstellar trade kind of ridiculous to begin with, but be that as it may. There is actually some interesting world-building going on in the interstices of this story, having to do with how different the Union culture is from Earth and station/merchanter culture, but the problem is that station/merchanter culture isn't presented in a very interesting way in this book. That's a problem for a book that ends up being the story of the foundation of the merchanter's alliance, where the trading families finally form a political alliance in order to hold their own against the contending Union and Earth powers.

So the war in the book is between Earth and Union, fighting over trade access to the stars that the stations give, with various other factions trapped in between. Most of the action takes place on Pell Station, which orbits a planet with indigenous alien life (the first that humans have discovered out side of Earth), and that's my other big problem with this book. The planet is called Downbelow by the people who live on Pell Station, and the sapient aliens on the planet are called, unironically as far as I can tell, Downers. One of Cherryh's great strengths has always been her depiction of aliens, but the Downers are by far the worst alien race she created. They are twee, furry, noble savages speaking in a horrific pidgin taken out of the worst kind of colonial fiction. They actually seem to be borrowed from Le Guin's "The Word for World Is Forest," which is another anti-colonial work of science fiction that I don't care for much because of the noble savagery of the aliens.

Anyway, the most interesting thread of this very long, very complicated story is a flash of cyberpunk in the form of Josh Talley, who is a character swept up and used as a sex toy by the pitiless fleet captain Signy Mallory. His memories of abuse are so tortured that he asks to have his mind essentially erased, but it turns out (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER) that he's actually a deep Union agent created in their labs and implanted with false memories to cover the fact that he's a saboteur. However, he has been so deeply messed with by both Union and Mallory that he believes the deep programming is the false self, and that's what gets partially erased. The truly false memories of being raised by an aunt on a sunny farm on Cyteen are left intact, and Josh is one deeply confused secret agent. The layers of false personality are quite fascinating. I just wish there had been more of that, which is probably why I enjoyed Cyteen a lot more than this one. 40,000 in Gehenna is a far better book too because of the truly weird aliens and the way they turn the humans weird too. Downbelow Station just seems like an overly-busy novel of political intrigue with way too many viewpoint characters for me to keep straight.

I should mention, first of all, that when I started reading this book, I mistakenly believed that it was written before Cherryh's Hugo-Award winning Downbelow Station. Not true. It turns out Cherryh started writing Merchanter's Luck and then decided she wanted to work out the back story, so she wrote Downbelow Station instead. So the feeling I got while reading this one that a lot of the backstory must be explained in more detail elsewhere turns out to be true. I actually found Merchanter's Luck pretty hard to follow at times, because it seemed to assume I knew things that I didn't actually know.

So what's it about? On one level it's a Boy Meets Girl story. It's also a boy and girl from opposite sides of the track story, but both are from the merchanters culture that is part of the backbone of Cherryh's big Union-Alliance future history. The merchanters are essentially the Alliance part. In merchanters culture, families own and run freighters that run between stations and planets. Edward Stevens (not his real name) is the last survivor of his family and runs their small fifty-person freighter essentially by himself. Allison Reilly, on the other hand, is from a large and prosperous family that runs a massive freighter with a thousand people on it. These two hook up for sex while on layover at one of the stations, and before too long have formed an unlikely partnership with Reilly wealth investing in Stevens' crappy little ship in an attempt to set up a new trading line in a newly-opened direction. This is part of the back story that got confusing to me, because I didn't fully understand what was in it for the Reillys.

It can also said to be a story about pirates. Stevens' family was essentially massacred by pirates when he was ten, and he has since then become more or less a pirate himself, running shady deals at the fringes of legal trade because he doesn't have the resources to do legitimate business. That's part of what his new partnership with the Reilly clan is supposed to solve. However, the book portrays even the very legitimate, prosperous Reillys as a form of pirates themselves, who are able to legitimatize whatever questionable business they get involved with through legal and bureaucratic maneuvering. Beyond that, and most confusing of all for those who haven't read Downbelow Station, is that Stevens' ship, Lucy, is more or less hijacked by Signy Mallory at the last minute to run suspect cargo to the station they had intended to trade with in a strictly legal capacity. Mallory is a caption of a huge military ship that's part of what's called alternatively the Company Fleet and the Mazianni. They are a military arm of the old Earth Company that started the interstellar trade routes to begin with (as is explained in Downbelow Station) who have more or less gone rogue as Earth's policital power has waned. In short the Mazianni are basically pirates, and one of their ships, possibly even Mallory's, is very likely to have been the one that attacked Stevens' family ship and massacred his family when he was a child.

Well, as always in Cherryh, there are no simple good guys and bad guys, just a lot of mutually antagonistic, selfish factions jostling with each other for advantage. It's never, ever clear who is on whose side, and everybody suspects everybody else of betrayal. Nerves are always just about to snap, panic and tears are always just about to break out. I have to admit that his book kind of wore me out after a while, maybe because I find the merchanter culture (and the idea of interstellar trade in general) basically unbelievable to begin with. But maybe I'd have enjoyed this one better if I'd read Downbelow Station first, because mostly this one left me feeling confused and like I was missing huge chunks of context. Which was true! Maybe that deflated all the political intrigue for me, because it's very much a novel of political intrigue between all the various factions.

However, I thought the ending was a particularly damp squib, and I think it's because Cherryh was resisting the traditional requirements of the pirate story. In a traditional pirate romance, the orphan who survives the pirate massacre ends up being a prince, and this story, which offers a corporate princess is the form of Allison, practically begs for Stevens to end up being a prince from some other wealthy family. But he's not. We do learn his real family name in the end, and it's a name that some of the other characters have heard of, but it doesn't appear that they were an especially affluent or important family, certainly nothing like the Reillys. Cherryh always resists the easy pay-off of traditional story forms, but somehow the uneasy truce she always ends up with instead didn't work for me in this story. Maybe pirates always up the ante, demanding something more dramatic. Whatever the case, this seemed like a lesser novel than the other Cherryh books I've been reading lately.

I first stumbled on this book one sunny day when I was walking around Lake Union with my friends Abi and Kristal. Abi stopped by a curbside "library" (a little kiosk where neighbors could leave books for other neighbors to borrow) and found this one. Kristal is a breast cancer survivor, so we had in fact been talking about cancer and death on our walk, and we were all struck by the weird synchronicity of this find. Kristal took a picture of Abi with the book, I posted it to Facebook, and my sister saw the photo and went to Powell's to look for the book. Once she'd read it, she gave it to me.

The subject-matter of the book is very similar to Atul Gawande's Being Mortal. However, Morris is a journalist, so her approach is much different from Gawande, who is a practicing surgeon as well as a writer. I have to admit that I found Morris' book a little over-written at times, and I preferred Gawande's focus on history, sociology, and science. Morris is more personal and more emotional. It's more populist, and less intellectual. However, she has a similar concern about how advances in medicine have paradoxically left us at a disadvantage in understanding and accepting our mortality. She doesn't cover the broad range of topics of how we handle the elderly and the dying that Gawande does, but instead she focuses on the ways in which even when we try to make sure our end-of-life experience isn't a nightmare of painful attempts to prolong life no matter what, we can get sucked into desperate measures anyway.

If there is a basic thesis here it's that a living will and explicit DNR instructions aren't necessarily going to save you from procedures you would prefer not to undergo. She is very compelling in exploring all the ambiguities and uncertain feelings that can lead family members, medical personnel, and even the dying person themselves to make bad decisions when push comes to shove. If your instruction is that "I don't want desperate measures unless there's a high probability that I'll be highly functional if I survive," how do you judge what is "high probability" or "highly functional"? One of Morris' strongest points is that a lot of times there's no right answer, so it's easy to let inertia carry you in the direction of "more life," for better or worse. While she tends to focus on stories where "more life" means "more suffering," she does acknowledge that sometimes "more life," even when it means "more suffering," can also mean "more time with family and loved ones." Is that time worth it? Who can possibly measure such a thing?

Although she does talk about practical things such as living wills, medical directives, and "value history forms" (in which you attempt to describe your priorities and what's important to you), or how to talk about death with loved ones who are dying or with children, the book is really less a how-to than an invitation to contemplate your mortality and what it means for you and those close to you. Like Gawande, she feels we are too insulated from death now, so we don't really deal with it until it's happening. A lot of times that's too late. Also like Gawande, she stresses how the process of dying can be a very clarifying thing and can bring people closer together. Gawande opened my eyes to the fact that fear of death can be allayed by a sense of connection to family and community, and I'd say Morris comes to that same point from a somewhat different direction. What matters in the end is our connection to other people, and the process of dying has a way of driving that home. If we can grasp this fact while we're still in the prime of life, then our lives and relationships will be richer for it. That's why she wants us to start talking about death sooner rather than later.

I knew that there had been two other books in the Riverside series published since Swordspoint, but I incorrectly assumed that the next published book, The Fall of the Kings, must be the next in the series. Turns out that the third published book, The Privilege of the Sword, is actually chronologically next in the series. Alas, it features the one character from The Fall of the Kings that I actually liked, even though she only makes a very late, deus ex machina kind of entry into the story. Worse, The Fall of the Kings is not a complete story in itself and seems to be the first half of a duology. I say "alas" and "worse" because I disliked The Fall of the Kings enough that, following my disappointment with a second reading of Swordspoint, I've lost interest in reading any more of the series. I might have been better off reading The Privilege of the Sword instead, but who knows? Maybe a full novel about the mysterious Jessica Campion wouldn't have worked for me either.

Anyway, The Fall of the Kings was co-written by Ellen Kushner's wife, Delia Sherman. I remarked in my review of Swordspoint that it still stands out as unusual in the fantasy genre for lacking magic and for being set in an imaginary world that's completely separate from our own, not a fairyland or otherworld that we can access through a portal, as in much traditional fantasy. The latter continues to be true in this novel, but this time there's a vastly richer history developed for this imaginary world, and the richer history includes magic. Somewhere on the internet I ran into a review describing the Riverside books as "alternate universe historical fiction." That's pretty close to it. It's an alternate universe in which things developed very much like they did in our universe's Europe up through the Renaissance, in terms of political organization and technology, but with almost none of the specifics the same, and of course now with real magic too.

If magic was non-existent in Swordspoint, it's contested here. Specifically, it's contested academically. This is very much a university novel, and one focus is an academic debate within the History department over whether references to wizards and magic in the historical past were metaphorical or real. Everybody agrees that a kingdom was formed when kings from the north came south with their wizards and formed a union via marriage with a queen in the south. This kingdom lasted for a few centuries before the last king was murdered by a cabal of southern nobles, leaving a noble-run polity without a king as discovered in Swordspoint. Historians are clear that every one of the ruling kings in the past had a wizard, but what they disagree about is whether the wizard actually practiced magic or whether they were frauds manipulating the credulous in order to gain power.

One of our protagonists, Basil St Cloud, is a revolutionary new historian who believes that the textual evidence that magic existed should be taken at face value and not dismissed as metaphorical nonsense. He delves into paraliterary sources such as ballads and personnel lists looking for more proof of his theory, while his rival, Crabbe, accepts the received academic wisdom of the day. If this sounds a little like the debate between scholasticism and empiricism in the Renaissance, it should, and that's part of the problem I had with the book. Why reinvent these debates in an alternate history? Well, I guess it's because they really want it to be about magic, and so they overlay another layer of secret history similar to The Golden Bough or The White Goddess regarding a past religion of a sacred king who is sacrificed to fertilize the land, which history has been masked, as Frazier and Graves claimed, by later religions who for political purposes appropriated parts of it while rejecting other parts.

What's weird about this to me is that Frazier and Graves were specifically arguing that there was an old matriarchal pagan religion that was overthrown by the patriarchal monotheistic religions such as Christianity, but at least in this first book, that dimension is missing. Here we get into the other thing I disliked about the book (and about Swordspoint on second reading too), but I have to tread carefully here, because I'm highly aware this may be my own bias speaking. Which is to say, the other focus of the story is the sexual relationship between St Cloud and the noble descendant of not only Alec from Swordspoint but of the Duke who killed the last king. This is Theron Campion, who is heir to the Duke of Tremontaine and an itinerant student at the University. Campion is actually bisexual (as were Alec and St Vier in Swordspoint) and a great beauty much lusted after by many characters in the novel. He has a passionate relationship with St Cloud, which reaches derangement of the senses levels. This is not a pornographic work, but there's a lot of description of male beauty, studly strutting and rutting, swelling members, tormented lust, and sweaty sheets. A lot. I can appreciate male beauty with the best of them, but I got really tired of the sexual obsessiveness. If you're into hot gay sex, your mileage may vary.

I do think it's daring and different to make a gay relationship the center of story like this, but I'm not sure that it makes sense, unless I'm completely misunderstanding the allusions to Frazier and Graves. Why make a gay relationship the center of a fertility cult? Possibly this is part of a subversive move that will be made clear in the next book, and we'll find that the mystical Land is the female principle that can only be fertilized by sex between two men, I don't know. That could actually end up being an interesting idea, but what I found in this part of the story seemed repetitive and non-sensical. I'm tempted to throw in a joke about ineluctable masculinity, just in case I turn out to be completely wrong-headed in my interpretation.

Well, as with Swordspoint, I was continually distracted by the ways in which this world seemed like a thinly disguised version of our own history transposed for some reason into this Neverneverland, from the conflict between Medieval scholasticism and Enlightenment empiricism, the allusions to Frazier and Graves, and the twentieth century academic bohemian experience reimagined as nobles slumming it in crime-ridden but gentrifying lower class taverns. (Way too many scenes of students arguing in taverns, too.) The mix certainly didn't work for me, even though some of the elements are of interest. It was slightly maddening, because I felt I should like it, but it just irritated the hell out of me instead. Late in the book, Theron's bastard lesbian pirate sister enters the story and enlivens the proceedings immeasurably by being smarter and more competent than everyone else in the room, which makes me curious about The Privilege of the Sword, which is apparently all about her, but after not enjoying either of these other Riverside novels, I'm not willing to give a third a try without strong evidence that it's something I actually would enjoy.

I pulled Swordspoint off my shelf because reading Georgette Heyer reminded me of it. Apparently I'm not the only one, because there in the first edition jacket copy is this quote from Peter S. Beagle: "Charming, exciting, and ironically provocative, rather as though Georgette Heyer had turned her hand to fantasy." I remember loving this novel when I first read it around the time it came out, but I didn't care for it as much this time. I'm not sure what the problem was the second time around, but it could be related to why Heyer almost immediately lost her appeal for me after the first novel I read. Maybe I don't actually like romance novels. Because Swordspoint is very much a romance, as in a story of love, and one of the things that was so striking about it back when it first came out (so to speak) was that it's a gay romance with more than a hint of S/M to it.

Of course another striking thing about Swordspoint that I found troublesome the second time through is that it's only a fantasy in that it takes place in a completely invented world. There's no magic, and it's not an Otherworld like Faerie. Neither is it a Ruritanian story, where the action takes place in an invented country that's still somehow part of our world. Swordspoint is set in an imaginary country that seems to be at the same level of technology as Europe in the Renaissance, so it does feel a little bit like traditional fantasy in that it's a world of swords, horses, ale houses, and aristocracy. While the story moves back and forth between the high class world of ducal places and the lowlife haunts of the impoverished, criminal Riverside district, where swordsman-for-hire Richard St Vier lives with his mysterious lover, Alec, it's mostly a novel of court intrigue, involving political machinations amongst the nobility, who are vying against each other for power and who hire St Vier to do their killing for them.

Part of my problem this time was that none of this felt very real to me. I know, it's a fantasy, what does reality have to do with it, right? Well, maybe nothing. But because it's all invented and because it's tied neither to history nor the alternate history and secret lore of Faerie, it felt like it was happening in a void in which none of the machinations really mattered. Again, maybe this is further evidence that I just don't care for romances, because the meat of the matter is the torrid, if playful, love of Richard and Alec. If you don't care about that (and I didn't this time), it's hard to care about the political intrigue that embroils them, although I will say that there are some ironic twists to the action invoking the law of unintended consequences that I did find very effective. But for me it lacked the weirdness and sense of alternate reality that I crave from fantasy and find in classics like Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter and Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (which Kushner cites as an influence).

Maybe I'm also in a sour enough mood right now due to personal circumstances that "witty" novels just aren't doing it for me. I remember thinking this was, in fact, a very witty, effervescent novel the first time I read it, but all the wit and high spirits seemed very flat to me this time around. The novel I read before this, Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, was also a romance but a very sour one, and it was much more to my taste. So I'm strongly hedging my review on this one, because I suspect that I'm just not in the right mood for Swordspoint right now. Alas, this has been even more the case for the sequel, The Fall of the Kings, which I've been reading since I finished Swordspoint and which does involve magic and secret lore, so maybe my problem isn't just with the romance. Your mileage is very likely to vary from mine, so make sure to read around about this very influential novel before you make a decision about whether to read it yourself. But of course, that's what you should always do.

Roy Kettle recommended this 1952 novel after I enthused on Facebook about Georgette Heyer's Friday's Child. He must have been responding to my comment on the slight satirical edge in the Heyer, because it's hard for me to imagine two more different books. (A little birdie told me, by the way, that one of my Heyer-loving friends was so upset by my sour review of Cotillion that he advises me not to read any more Heyer for the time being. I'll heed this no doubt wise advice before I get myself into trouble.) Anyway, Excellent Women is a romance of sorts, although to my mind it's a romance of disappointments and humiliations, and it's also a comedy of sorts, although I've elsewhere described it as the most melancholy comedy I've ever encountered. But at least one fan of the book didn't accept that description, so I'll try to tread carefully here. In truth, I find it hard to describe the book. It has also been categorized as a social comedy and a comedy of manners. It's a very finely observed satire of a certain British social class that I probably don't understand well enough to describe.

To quote Penguin's jacket copy, the protagonist, Mildred Lathbury, is "a clergyman's daughter and mild-mannered spinster." As Pym writes of her, in the first person, she does "part-time work at an organization which helped impoverished gentlewomen, a cause very near to my own heart, as I felt that I was just the kind of person who might one day become one.” This is very much a novel of reduced circumstances. It takes place in Britain right after WWII, and the empire has fallen and food rationing is still in place. The "excellent women" of the title are women like Mildred who are largely invisible and ignored, especially by men, but who are indispensable to making this threadbare society work. Mildred is dowdy, reserved, and cautious, but somewhere in her is a repressed stream of poetry and romance. She doesn't trust it, and indeed the novel seems to mock it. The men and women with the most romantic appeal in the story are the least trustworthy.

The excellent women toil in the shadows, and there's an interesting feminist aspect to the novel that never becomes really political. Men are portrayed as lazy and parasitical on women, but if Mildred or the other women feel any anger about it, the anger, like all other feelings, is repressed and reserved. The satire is delicate, and it aims at everyone, including most certainly Mildred herself, who constantly stifles her own impulses with a crushing sense of propriety and passivity: "I hesitated, for there was an uneasy feeling in the air, as if umbrage were about to be taken." The excellent women are not above policing each other for trying to get above their social station or for being overly romantic or, indeed, for not recognizing that sometimes you have to settle for something less than ideal because it's the proper, excellent thing to do.

Well, I despair of getting at why this is so funny, and partly it's because the comedy is so subtle. To repeat, it's a comedy of disappointment, humiliation, and making do. If the novel is in fact less melancholy than I found it, it's because the characters are more accepting of their disappointments and defeats than I want them to be, even as I admire Mildred's resilience and persistent, if sometimes self-defeating, kindness. It's really quite remarkable, and Pym's great strength is an ability to create portraits of recognizable individuals. If the characters are all slightly vain and ineffectual, well, it's a satire. As a longtime spinster myself, I suppose I recognized my own failings in Mildred's, although she is a far more excellent woman than I am. What's been interesting in reading about Pym and the modern response to her in the aftermath of reading the novel is that she appears to be making another comeback with the millennial generation that is so far more resistant to marriage than its elders. Pym was eventually dismissed as old-fashioned in her day, but maybe she was actually ahead of her time after all.

I can see why my Heyer-loving friends recommended Cotillion when I expressed my enthusiasm for Friday's Child, because the plots are quite similar. I also have to say that my enthusiasm for Heyer has lessened with each novel I've read. I liked The Grand Sophy less than Friday's Child and Cotillion less than The Grand Sophy, and that's at least partly because the plots all seem quite similar. Well, that's a simplification, and it's not just the plots that seem similar. There are words or turns of phrase (such as "make a cake of someone" or "a Tulip of fashion" of "missish") that I've already gotten tired of. Anyway, I believe I'll give Heyer one more book -- A Civil Contract -- but I'm beginning to think this is a love that won't last.

The plot of Cotillion involves an orphan named Kitty who was raised by a man who was in love with her French mother but otherwise was not related. She's like Hero Wantage in Friday's Child in that she's an orphan who is not of noble birth, but the variation here is that the man who raised her does have money and offers it to whichever great nephew (some of whom are nobles) who agrees to marry Kitty. This is just as contrived a situation as the one in Friday's Child, where the male protagonist, Lord Sherringham, won't inherit his fortune unless he marries before he turns 25. As in FC, where Sherry first asks for the hand of his beloved, there is an assumed favorite for Kitty amongst the "cousins" who have known her since she was a child, and he, like Sherry, is a rake and gambler. What's different in Cotillion is that Kitty's various suitors, not to mention Kitty herself, are not particularly bright. Indeed, while Kitty, like Hero, tries to solve the romantic problems of others while embroiling herself in all kinds of "scrapes" in a high society she doesn't understand, she doesn't seem particularly good at it. Certainly, she is nowhere near the master manipulator that Sophy is in The Grand Sophy.

Meanwhile, just as Sherry foolishly marries Hero to get revenge on the beloved who rejects him, Kitty proposes to her not-very-bright cousin, Freddy, that they pretend to be engaged so that she can go to London and learn the high society ropes. There she gets involved in the romantic turmoils of other not very bright characters, including her "cousin" Dolphinton, who lives in terror of his domineering mother, and the beautiful low-born Olivia, who is also pushed around by her domineering, greedy mother. If this novel seems inferior to the first two Heyers I read, it's probably because I didn't find the characters very interesting. Freddy is probably the most interesting. As in FC, where Sherry transforms himself over the course of the novel from cad to hero, Freddy undergoes the most interesting transformation in this one. In some ways his most interesting characteristic to begin with is that he understands fashion and color, but by the end he has, in his own bumbling and priggish way, become an unconventional solver of other peoples' problems.

While this one felt quite conventional to me, by Heyer's standards, I have to confess that I read almost the whole thing in one day, which proves it got its narrative hooks into me. Also, I was in a shitty mood the whole day, which may have affected my appreciation of the novel. Thus I'll give Heyer another chance. For whatever reason, this one didn't do the trick for me. The characters seemed largely tiresome to me, and I had a hard time caring when everyone's romantic problems were solved in a rapid, triumphant tumble in the end. I take it that a cotillion is a kind of formal dance, so perhaps that's Heyer's comment on her own structural, thematic formalism.

This is a very dense, complex, difficult novel, even by Cherryh's standards.It's squarely set in her Union-Alliance future history, and it first came to my attention through the references to the events of the book in Cherryh's Hugo-winning Cyteen. Unlike, say, Port Eternity, which is also about Union space and the azi but takes place off to the side in the future history, this one refers to major historical events, like the War between the Union and Sol forces in Downbelow Station that led to the Merchanters Alliance. In fact, the colonization effort in 40,000 in Gehenna is a continuation of that war by other means.

So the ostensible plot is that the totalitarian Union has decided to colonize the planet Gehenna with a mixed force of born-men and azis. The azis are considered lab-born: genetically-modified clones who have also been conditioned or programmed using what is called "tape," which delivers information/instructions to the subconscious subliminally. Most azi are basically slaves who have had the ability to make decision programmed out of them, but there appears to be another category of Union citizens who have been genetically modified and slightly conditioned but who still can make independent decisions. One of the additional layers of complexity in this novel that I don't fully understand is that some non-azi people sneak onboard the colony ship disguised as azi. It's not clear to me why they do it (for sheer scientific curiosity?) or who organized it (a mysterious "board"), but the main character in this group, Gutierrez, swiftly becomes a team leader amongst the regular scientific "civs".

40,000 in Gehenna bristles with all kinds of ancillary documents and commentaries, from genealogical trees to maps to scientific reports to diary entries, and I think there's a lot of information buried in these documents that would take multiple readings to fish out. What the novel really ends up being about is how the Union abandons the colony -- and in fact never really intended to follow through on the colonization plan -- and how the abandoned colony transforms over the course of multiple generations. Because the cloning labs are never set up, the azi are allowed to reproduce in the usual human way, but because the tape training systems are never set up, they are never trained how to raise their children. So their children are strange and detached to begin with, being raised by parents with no independent judgment or feelings of their own.

However, the other layer of complexity to the novel involves Gehenna's natives -- a variety of apparently semi-intelligent lizards that the humans call ariels (the small, green, pretty ones) or calibans (the larger, uglier, grey or brown ones). The question of the sapience of the lizards hovers over the novel and is a source of argument between the human scientists. Gradually the calibans, who initially seem harmless, grow more aggressive toward the colonists, and the descendants of the colonists form disturbing relationships with the calibans. As so often in Cherryh, the humans become more alien, but what's interesting about this novel is that the aliens seem also to grow more human in terms of aggression and territorialism. The humans who form the closest relationships with the calibans basically can't communicate with other humans any more and are considered Weird even by the strange standards of the nearly autistic descendants of the azi.

What's also interesting is that Cherryh seems to be in dialogue with Anne McCaffery's Pern books here: a lost colony of humans who have formed a symbiotic relationship with reptile aliens. She even refers to the aliens as dragons occasionally, and of course they are color-coded as well. But Cherryh's aliens are decidedly more alien than McCaffery's, and the form of communication between the two species, while non-verbal, is not telepathic. Instead, the lizards use a non-verbal form of language called Patterning, which is described as symbolic. Eventually Cherryh delves into how this works, but for the most part we only get a subjective experience of it, which can be baffling at best.

Meanwhile, off-planet humans are trying to understand what happened to the colony. In Cherryh's future history humans try to practice non-intervention when they encounter alien species, but this novel is an interrogation of the whole concept of non-intervention. Human scientists inevitably get drawn into relationships with the descendants of the colonists and their caliban allies, and the whole question of the neutrality of scientific observation comes up. It's safe to say that Cherryh doesn't believe in scientific neutrality or objectivity. The observer has an influence on the observed, and this has political implications as things finally come to a head hundreds of years after the initial colonization.

One of the things that wasn't completely clear to me after a first reading was whether the political factions that form between different alliances of human descendants and calibans reflects a difference in the descendants of pure azi genetic lines and those that also have non-azi genetic lines in them. Really it might have to do with those humans who had rearing only from azi parents and those who had some rearing from non-azi parents somewhere back in the past. The main difference between the two factions seems to be the one eats grey calibans and the other eats only fish, but the one faction also seems to patriarchal while the other has female leaders (and warriors) as well as male.

There were parts of 40,000 in Gehenna that reminded me of the horrific aspects of Voyager in Night, particularly the claustrophobic encounters underground that cause traumatic transformations in some of the characters. There are grotesque sexual encounters that feel very much like rape, but in which the characters seem to just surrender to it because it's the only way they will survive, even though they know they will be something completely alien on the other side of the experience. These sequences are ugly and terrifying, and they seem to embody Cherryh's theme of becoming alien in the most visceral terms. It's a horrific experience, and Cherryh embraces a tragic view of the human condition. People have no control over their lives, they get hurt, they get abused, they get changed, and all they can do is try to make the best of whatever traumas life deals them.

To my mind this all adds up to some very powerful fiction, and it actually reminds me of some of Delany's more avant garde explorations of similar themes in his later career. Cherryh is just as radical as Delany in a less avant garde fashion. This is a very high concept novel told from multiple and clashing points of view over a long period of time, and as I say, it's a challenging and difficult work to digest. Sometimes I feel that Cherryh bites off more than she can chew and doesn't always give us adequate context to understand all the layers (cf Gutierrez posing as an azi), but perhaps further readings will reveal the context that I missed the first time. Cyteen has long been my favorite Cherryh novel, but after my recent Cherryh spree, focusing on her odder early novels, I'm beginning to think I've barely scraped the surface of her greatness. I'll be reading more.

'He felt uncertain what his life had meant up to this point. He remembered well enough. But the importance he had attached to things was all revised. His life now seemed more preparatory than substantive. He looked forward to things to come. There would be a world, he believed; and he was called on to build it. He would become more and more like a born-man and he would be on this assignment for the rest of his life, one of the most important assignments even born-men hoped to get. All of this was due to his good fortune in having been born in the right year, on the right world, of the right gene-set, and of course it was due to his excellent attention to his work. There would be only good tape for him, and when he had gotten where he was going, when he looked about him at the new land, there were certain things which would have to be done at once, with all the skill he had. People believed in him. They had chosen him. He was very happy, now that all the disturbing things were over, now the he could sit in his own bunk and know that he was safe ... and he would have just about enough time to understand it all before they would be there, so the tape promised.' (C.J. Cherryh, 40,000 in Gehenna)

I've probably written before that when I was the golden age of science fiction (twelve) I worked my way through the shelf of Andre Norton novels at the Salem Public Library, and that was my introduction to science fiction. The thing I've realized recently is that none of her earliest SF novels were on that shelf, probably because the original hardcover editions of those '50s books had worn out by the time I got to my reading project in 1972. So I've decided to go back to those earlier novels, starting with this one because a friend had a copy I could borrow.

Star Guard was published in 1955, and of course now that I've read it I discover there was an earlier novel in what is called the Central Control sequence, which concerns a point in Norton's rough Future History in which humanity has reached the stars only to discover an existing galactic federation that finds humans to be militaristic savages and thus forces them to serve as mercenaries in the rare instances where military endeavors are still required. So this is a military novel focused on Terran mercenaries, but it is also an adaptation of Xenophon's Anabasis or The March Upcountry, which is a non-fiction account of an army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus of Persia to dethrone his brother Artaxerxes II in 401 BC. As in Xenophon's historical account, the alien leader who hires the Terran mercenaries is killed, followed by the leadership of the mercenaries, and then the survivors have to fight their way through hostile alien territory to try to get back home.

Norton adds a backstory about humanity's grudging subservience to their alien overlords, with additional speculative history about how Terrans may have previously reached the stars before they met the aliens, as well as deeper history regarding a thousand years of nuclear war on Earth that nearly wiped humans out and largely drove them underground. Clearly in 1955 Norton was still thinking about World War II, militarism, and Hiroshima, and as so often her sense of human savagery is refreshingly bleak. But she's still an idealist, and you know her heroes aren't going to be subservient forever.

On one level this is just another variation on the Galactic Patrol or Legion of Space story, but bending it to the story of Anabasis plot makes it more interesting than the run of the mill variety of these kinds of stories. Since I had recently reread Ordeal in Otherwhere I was struck by some similarities in the marine-based alien races and environments of the planets in the two books. Norton's world-building always feels as though it's borrowed from other books, but the details are re-aggregated in fascinating ways. The plot is clean and well-structured and moves right along, with lots of good action, factional intrigue, and political maneuvering. There may not be a conceptual breakthrough (cf. Clute's remark about the lack of such in Norton in his article about her in the SF Encyclopedia), but it's a coming of age novel about the young protagonist in which he comes to a new understanding about his purpose and goal in life. There's also a transformation of political reality in the end that feels a little like something out of van Vogt. It all feels thoroughly familiar, but it's handled with supreme skill and confidence.

Georgette Heyer is a name I've been familiar with for years because for some reason a lot of science fiction fans like her novels. I seem to recall that the late rich brown was a fan of hers, as is Jo Walton, and now I discover via Hazel Ashworth that D West recommended her novels to Hazel years ago and that Friday's Child was a particular favorite of theirs. Since I've been focused on women writers lately, this appeared to be an ideal time to finally explore Heyer's work, so I picked this one up at Powell's City of Books while I was in Portland for Christmas.

The novel starts out with a bit of a head fake that initially threw me off. Viscount Sheringham proposes marriage to the Incomparable Isabella Milborne, widely believed to the most beautiful woman available -- and as a side benefit she's quite wealthy too. Isabella rejects the proposal, because she considers Sherry an irresponsible gambler and libertine. Sherry, who won't inherit his fortune unless he marries before he turns 25, flies into a rage and vows to marry the first woman he sees. This turns out to be Hero Wantage (what a name!), who is a childhood friend of his and Isabella's who was raised by a cousin when she was orphaned at an early age. Sherry always treated Hero as a bratty kid sister, but when he learns that her mean-spirited cousin is trying to force her to become a governess in Bath, he takes pity on her and proposes marriage. She accepts.

From this set up, I confess I thought the novel would be about how Sherry would reform his rakish ways and win the Incomparable over in the end. However, I was quite wrong about that. The title is from an old nursery rhyme about the character traits of people according to what day they were born on:

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath day
Is fair and wise and good in every way.

Wikipedia says there's an alternative version which has it, "Friday's child works hard for a living/Saturday's child is loving and giving," but Heyer pretty clearly had the former version in mind. Hero is an unbelievably sweet and giving person, and the novel is a kind of satire contrasting her essential goodness and empathy with the selfishness and corruption of the aristocratic crowd that Sherry runs with. Far from being about Sherry's reformation in pursuit of Isabella, the novel is about his reformation in pursuit of Hero.

I loved pretty much everything about this book. I loved Heyer's assured, precise, nuanced prose style, her vivid characterization, complex plotting, sly wit, and also her rowdy humor. There's a scene involving a duel between Sherry and one of his upper crust friends whom he sees kissing Hero that is particularly hilarious and had me laughing out loud in delight. Early on I thought I might find the unquestioned life of ease and plenty of these aristocratic characters tiresome after a while, but the slight air of satire kept it fresh, and to be honest it works as a kind of fantasy world as well, where you can have the vicarious pleasure of never having to worry about money or work or really anything other than, well, pleasure. Heyer is aware that her characters are less than admirable, but she generously forgives them for it, whether they deserve the generosity or not. Yet she keenly observes their absurd vanity, selfishness, and meanness, all the while contrasting it with Hero's loving and giving self-sacrifice, which puts them all to shame. It's wish-fulfillment, but it's very funny, sweet, and moving as a form of escape from harsher realities, and that was something I really valued at this particular juncture in my life. It definitely convinced me to read more Heyer, and maybe to get back to Jane Austen, to whom Heyer is often compared, because Heyer wrote a lot of romances set in the Regency era. Hazel Ashworth says D. liked to say that Heyer was like Austen on speed. Sounds about right to me. It was also funny to discover how much of D's humor I could see in Heyer. It didn't surprise me to learn that he loved Hunter S. Thompson, but I surely had no ideas whatsoever that he loved Georgette Heyer too. It's enlarging to be surprised like that, I must say. Many thanks to Hazel for recommending the book, which she says has helped her through many a hard time too.

This book was a gift from

ron_drummond, who thought it might be useful to me in thinking about treatment options for my cancer. It turned out to be much more than that, and indeed it really opened my eyes regarding mortality in ways that I'd been vaguely hoping my whole life I'd eventually come to see. Much of the book is not about terminal illness in the sense of cancer but rather what happens as we get older and our bodies start to fail. It's a difficult book to read, because it forces us to confront what that physical failure looks and feels like. Gawande, who is a practicing surgeon, is an impressive writer, and he spends a lot of time on the social history of care for the elderly over the centuries and how it has changed in the face of modern medical advances. One central thesis is that as we've gotten better at prolonging life, we've gotten worse at accepting our mortality and at making good decisions about how we want to die. The most depressing chapter was probably the one about the practice of geriatric medicine in this country and how it is so badly rewarded that we don't have nearly enough physicians practicing geriatrics to serve our aging population.

The thing that Gawande really helped me understand is how our perspective and priorities change when we are confronted with mortality, and it felt as though he was talking to me in real time as my own perspective shifted in the face of the diagnosis that I have a very aggressive and, statistically speaking, probably fatal form of brain cancer. The thing that has blown me away is the tide of love and support that has flowed my way in response to this news, and how calming it has been. I was completely shocked and freaked out by the initial discovery of the tumor and the speed with which I was assigned to have major brain surgery and my life was totally upended, but as my family and friends formed a circle around me, the fear and panic rapidly abated. I didn't understand why, but Gawande spells it out in plain language: 'The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don't, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not.' The thing I've been realizing is that in my family and in the science fiction community I'm part of something larger than myself, and that something larger will survive after I'm gone. I find it enormously comforting right at the moment. Not that I'm not ever going to be afraid again, and even now I'm worried about the upcoming radiation/chemo treatment and what that might do to my health and whether it will actually do anything to help me survive.

One of the other hard parts about reading the book is that Gawande's father eventually developed an astrocytoma tumor like mine, and he reacted very badly to the radiation and chemo treatment I'm about to undergo. Of course, he'd already been suffering from a spinal tumor, and everybody handles these things differently. I've been told over and over that my cancer is unique -- pretty much literally so, since it's based on my own genetic material -- and thus my experience is also going to be unique to me. When Gawande does get to the terminal illness chapters of the book, he has some very helpful things to say about how to make choices to preserve what's important to you rather than just to try to prolong life. He emphasizes the advantages of figuring out what's important to you in the first place and then deciding what trade-offs you're willing to make to preserve it. He also has some interesting things to say about studies showing that hospice can be very useful not only in helping you make these final decision, but also even, in some cases, helping you live longer without further potentially damaging medical treatment. These are hard things to think about, but he illustrates with vivid examples the ways that facing up to the realities can pay off in quality of life and love at the end of it all.

Over all I thought this was a brilliant, very well-written and -researched book, and I think it would be useful to anyone who is dealing with a dying relative or friend or is interested in thinking about their own mortality. I will say, however, that it reduced me to tears any number of times just from the compassionate descriptions of the suffering and loss that some people suffer as their lives or the lives of their loved ones go south. It's not an easy read, but I highly recommend it. It taught me things I needed to know.

'Mr Fawnshope, having written some thirty lines of his tragedy the previous day, with which he was not dissatisfied, was in a complaisant humor, neither chasing an elusive epithet, nor brooding over an infelicitous line. He said everything that was proper, and, when all enquiries into the invalid's condition were exhausted, conversed on various topics so much like a sensible man that Mr Rivenhall found himself quite in charity with him, and was only driven from the room by Lady Ombersley's request to the poet to read aloud to her his lyric on Annabel's deliverance from danger. Even this abominable affectation could not wholly dissipate the kindlier feelings with which he regarded Mr Fawnthorpe, whose continued visits to the house gave him a better opinion of the poet than was at all deserved. Cecilia could have told him that Mr Fawnthorpe's intrepidity sprang more from a sublime unconsciousness of the risk of infection than from any deliberate heroism, but since she was not in the habit of discussing her lover with her brother he continued in a happy state of ignorance, himself too practical a man to comprehend the density of the veil in which a poet could wrap himself.' (Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy)

This is another stand alone novel from fairly early in Cherryh's career (copyright 1985). The bibliography at Wikipedia thinks this takes place in the Union-Alliance universe, although if there's evidence in the story, I missed it. Interestingly the bibliography lumps it under the category "The Age of Exploration" with two of the "magic mushroom" novels: Port Eternity and Wave without a Shore, the former of which is clearly in the Union-Alliance universe and the latter also not providing any evidence either way that I noticed.

The subject-matter of this novel is prime Cherryh material. An apparently human child called Thorn is being raised by an alien warrior named Duun who is a member of a guild called the hatani that I believe I've read is based on Japanese martial culture, and possibly specifically the samurai code. The aliens are covered in fur and have claws and doglike ears. Thorn is a freak to the aliens, but Duun is raising him to be hatani -- a radical act that is politically dicey. So as so often in Cherryh we have an outcast struggling to survive in a hostile society, and we have a human learning to be alien.

This is a very good book, and I was interested to see, also in Wikipedia, that it was nominated for the Hugo. It doesn't seem to me to have much of a reputation now, but I was pretty impressed with it. The central mystery of the story is where Thorn came from, and the answer is complex and builds to a climactic revelation that completely transforms the scale and perspective of the story's frame of reference. It's a little overwrought at times, but that's really my only criticism. Cherryh is very good at holding her secrets close to the vest through tight control of narrative point of view and also at depicting the political in-fighting amongst people who have very different understandings of what is important and thus very different agendas. All of this is revealed and resolved in a very satisfactory way in the eventful finale.

It's been a couple of weeks since I read this, so I'm not sure how good my memory of it is. Anyway, I found it the most difficult of the Cherryh books I've read to understand in the first place, and it's also the weirdest and creepiest of the three "magic mushroom" novels collected in the Alternate Realities ominbus. The other two, which I've previously reviewed, are Wave without a Shore and Port Eternity.

The scenario, to the extent that I understood it, is that three humans -- a brother, sister, and childhood friend who has married the sister -- have scraped together enough money to buy a cargo ship, and they are working in a star system when a large alien ship of some kind swoops in and grabs them. All three of them are scanned, and two of them are painfully killed. The two who were scanned are then re-embodied and begin to interact with the survivor. Further scans are made of, I believe, all three, and then some of those scans are re-embodied, so that there are multiple versions of the characters with different memories depending on when they were scanned and re-embodied. That's part of what makes the book so confusing, and then on top of that all the aliens are referred to with names that consist of non-letter characters, often nested in ways that are slightly different but look very similar.

It's also a horror story, which is not my favorite genre by far. Terrible things happen to all the human characters, and it appears that the aliens are experimenting on them for obscure purposes. By the time I got to the end, I was pretty much completely lost. I had literally lost the plot and didn't understand the resolution. Still, it scores extremely high on the wild-ass weirdness scale, and once again I give Cherryh a lot of credit for writing something so strange and different from her other work, and to DAW for publishing a book that wasn't even remotely commercial in nature. Those were the days, by grab! 1984, to be exact. That seems appropriately dystopian, in fact.

Port Eternity is the second of three Cherryh novels that have been referred to as her "magic mushroom" novels. The first is Wave Without a Shore, and the third is Voyager in Night. The three novels have a reputation of being offbeat, and they have been collected in an omnibus called Alternate Realities.

Port Eternity is a kind of metafiction. It is specifically a story about the Arthurian legend. At it's core its about the wealthy owner of a pleasure space yacht that's called the Maid of Astolat. The staff and crew of the ship are azi, which are people from the Union part of Cherryh's Union-Alliance universe, who are clones that have been conditioned or programmed using pre-recorded instructional tapes. The azi are created according to the designs of their owners, and Dela is a woman who lives in a kind of romantic daydream based on Arthurian legend. Therefore her azi are all based on characters from Arthurian legend and specifically from Tennyson's poem, Idylls of the King, which is quoted at the head of every chapter. Dela sets off on a pleasure cruise with her latest lover, Griffin (hmmm, where could that name come from?)

The next layer of the meta is that Dela's azi personal assistant, Elaine, has been secretly indulging in a story tape that's clearly a version of Tennyson's poem. Story tapes are experienced in a way similar to how the behavioral conditioning of the azi is applied: you take a drug and then the content of the tape is piped into your receptive brain, and you live the story out vicariously, like a kind of virtual reality. Therefore Elaine is conscious of how she herself and all her fellow azi staff and crew are shaped to be like characters in the tape, not just behaviorally but in their physical cloning. This gives her something like a tragic view of things as she watches, for example, her personal favorite, Lance, struggle to accept that his services aren't needed while Griffin is giving Dela the pleasure she craves, and it also shapes her view of how Vivien, who is, or at least perceives herself to be, slightly superior to Elaine in the ship hierarchy, behaves. The other azi on the ship are Lynette, Percival, Gawain, and (ominous music) the nerveless Modred, who is conditioned to be analytical and asexual.

As for what actually happens in the book, the Maid is stranded in subspace during a failed FTL jump. Initially this is a very hallucinatory experience in which the whole universe seems to be turned inside out and nothing makes perceptual sense. Eventually, however, they become accustomed to their bizarre new surroundings, and they encounter a large artificial structure that has attracted other ships to it over time. After that it's an ongoing struggle to understand what the structure is and what is happening to them and what to do about it as the existential crisis gets more and more tense and the preprogrammed relationships start to fray. Our understanding of what the characters are up to plays out against our understanding of the characters and the story they're based on.

The concept of the azi is a fascinating one that Cherryh explored to even greater effect a few years later in her Hugo-winning novel, Cyteen. What's interesting here is the way in which the azi are a kind of fiction to begin with -- which is to say, they are created things that may or may not serve the purpose their creators intended -- and who in this story have to grapple with their place in another kind of fiction. The conditioning of the azi creates an air of control and fatalism, and yet their biological nature makes the conditioning uncertain. Meanwhile Cherryh gets to play around with vicarious experience, dreamlife, free will, and the relationship between story and reality, and yet she's doing it in a purely genre, as opposed to literary, way. Just as with Wave Without a Shore, it has the feeling of an experimental work while not being avant garde at all.

Cherryh has said in an interview that Donald Wollheim allowed her to write this kind of offbeat novel as long as she kept it short and continued to produce big middle-of-the-road science fiction blockbusters like Downbelow Station and Cyteen, but I suspect that this was due to the special relationship they had and to the moment in publishing history in which this was occurring -- i.e. the era of the wire rack displays in drug stores and such, where a steady flow of mass market paperbacks fed the ravening maw of readers looking for a cheap thrill. I seriously doubt that even best-selling writers have this kind of freedom anymore, but what do I know? It's not as if these three novels by Cherryh had much of an obvious impact on the field, and they are still amongst her least-known books. On the other hand, it's pretty cool that they're still in print in that omnibus. On that note I've got to say that the original DAW paperback cover is one of the ugliest and least evocative they ever did.

Profile

randy_byers

Dreamland Cafe

September 2017

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 26th, 2025 05:52 pm

Dry Ice Factory

Good place to get some thinking done

Entries tagged with books

Trio by Sarah Tolmie

Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler

The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar

The Stone Boatmen by Sarah Tolmie

Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh

Merchanter's Luck by C.J. Cherryh

Talking about Death Won't Kill You by Virginia Morris

The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

40,000 in Gehenna by C.J. Cherryh

QOTD

Star Guard by Andre Norton

Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

QOTD

Cuckoo's Egg by C.J. Cherryh

Voyager in Night by C.J. Cherryh

Port Eternity by C.J. Cherryh