Autumnal mood #strangerthings
Last time a new Trek series premiered I was a newly minted high school freshman. We’ve been long overdue. #startrek #startrekdiscovery
Babylon’s Ashes Review: 4/5 Amos’ Grins *Spoiler for Nemesis Games*
By the time many series get past the middle point of their
run a couple of things can happen: they become rote, meandering productions
that repeat and minutely rearrange plot devices so the reader thinks they are experiencing
something drastically different, or they perform the literary equivalent of
“jumping the shark,” adding nonsensical characters and thrusting their
protagonists into a deep well of absurdity. James S.A. Corey (nom de plume of writing duo Ty Franck
and Daniel Abraham) largely manage to avoid those pitfalls with the sixth entry
in their monstrously popular Expanse series, Babylon’s Ashes. With a
decentralized focus on the crew of Rocinante
this Sol system sweeping yarn reads like the direct conclusion to the
previous novel, Nemesis Games.
Until this point each novel in The Expanse has largely been a self-contained
narrative—past events are referenced but never relied upon in most cases, and
major antagonists and central conflicts are put to bed by the time the last
pages are turned. Nemesis Games was
something of a departure from that formula by leaving Marco Inaros, de facto leader
of the Belter’s so called “Free Navy,” alive, free, and still very much a
threat.
More than just the struggle against Inaros, Babylon’s
Ashes is the fulfillment of a promised conflict that has been brewing since
the opening of Leviathan Wakes—and
for the most part it works. We are ushered around the solar system to be in the
room for all the tactical decision making of the key players and the ensuing
battles, but Corey weaves more minor character perspectives (including some
fan-pleasing cameos) into the fiction than ever before. This is the politics of
the Sol System zoomed out to the macro level; humans and the fragile power
structures they’ve built performing an intricate dance.
And it is all about the humans. I’ll
admit I expected this series to lean into the more fantastically alien elements
of its DNA at a little over the halfway mark of a planned nine novels. After
seeing so much of modern fiction relying on the “humans are the real enemy”
trope, I was expecting an expansion in a less grounded direction. The fantastical
is a fringe element here: acknowledged and utilized but never dominating the
narrative.
So with the majority of the human enemy element dealt with, does this now shift
the series to an “Us vs. Aliens” story for the conclusion. Well, maybe. The
Expanse is written like a big budget sci-fi drama and I believe that it’ll
follow the curve of that arc to its conclusion: we’ll see humanity’s patchwork
alliances put to the test against a supernatural other (similar to what Game
of Thrones is doing now) but we haven’t seen the end of infighting. As long
as you hang on for the ride and enjoy the minute-to-minute drama the journey is
rewarding
“‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’” #lotr #literature
Thrawn Review: 4/5 Death Stars
If the only encounter you’ve ever had with Star Wars is the films you might be of the opinion that the truly formidable villains in a galaxy far, far away either wield deadly lightsabers and the force or some kind of obnoxiously destructive weapon like the Death Star. However if you were to ask a fan of the Expanded Universe (recently re-titled Legends and stricken from continuity) what their favorite villain is many of them would name Grand Admiral Thrawn: a character originally introduced in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire. He is a brilliant tactician…and that’s about it. As a Chiss (a race of blue-skinned, red-eyed humanoids) he can see in infrared, but other than that he possesses no force-like abilities or super-human strength. And that’s what makes him so intriguing.
A fan favorite character, Thrawn was recently brought back into continuity (albeit at a different point in the timeline) and was to receive his own origin novel penned by the same author that brought him into existence almost thirty years ago. So here we have the novel that pulls back the curtain on the mysterious Grand Admiral—sort of. This is more a novel about several careers in the Empire: Thrawn himself, Arihnda Pryce, and Thrawn’s aid, Eli Vanto; the former two being first featured in the new continuity on the Disney XD series Star Wars Rebels. Any chapters that focus on Thrawn have internal observations and there is an excerpt from his journal preceding each chapter. From this you can cobble together a blurry picture of “Thrawn” the person, but you never feel like you know him. Neither will you know who he was before his military career with the Chiss.
Yet he remains a compelling character with one caveat: he is never beaten. Not once. Everything is part of his plan. Maybe it’s a function of an already developed tactical mind. And maybe that’s the point. Zahn does make an effort of characterizing Thrawn as being oblivious to politicking despite a meteoric rise through the Empire’s navy, and even goes so far as to show the careers that have been inconvenienced to push him through the ranks. But that sits in the background, as does the topic of the Empire’s systemic xenophobia. There are characters that make their disdain for aliens known (without the evocative bite of today’s racism), but Thrawn never seems to violently bristle at it—perhaps because it is in his nature?
As mentioned before this is also the story of Arihnda Pryce, and while her narrative doesn’t seem like an afterthought there is a slight sense of it dragging the main plot down. Pryce is a compelling character in her own right and while her narrative connects to Thrawn’s in an interesting way, I have to wonder if she would have been better served with her own novel while making way for more of Thrawn’s pre-Empire life. The real meat here is a number of Thrawn’s campaigns in which he demonstrates his brilliance and usefulness to the brass at High Command.
The big takeaway here is that Zahn gets you to root for the Empire. The actual Empire. You will identify with Vanto, and admire Thrawn, and Pryce (to a lesser extent—she is the most traditionally “evil”) and you will want to see their enemies ground into the dirt despite the fact that some of them are the foundations of the Rebellion. There is a mildly refreshing gesture at a deeper morality beyond what is on display in the films. The Empire is a complex and multi-headed beast; not everyone’s goals are the same. Surprisingly the callbacks to other well known Star Wars characters and locales (and even one or two references to the original Thrawn trilogy) are few, but enough that they’ll cause excited “lip twitching” when they do come up. While not perfect, it is serves as a good jumping on point for the new continuity. Glory to the Empire.
Ancillary Justice Review: 5/5 Reanimated Soldiers.
There are these moments every now and then when you finally get around to skimming something off of your to-read pile that received all the buzz and accolades the zeitgeist could muster, and it truly ends up surprising you. You knew you were going to fall in like, but did you see love coming? And just like that Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice got into my brain like Radchaai reeducation.
With every dive into a new universe (especially with science fiction or fantasy) the quality of the world-building in the first 70 pages or so will often make or break the rest of the experience for me. Too many details thrown out there and you often find yourself frantically paging back to find unnecessary minutiae, too few and, well, to appropriate Gertrude Stein: “there’s no there there.” Leckie seems to demonstrate acute awareness of this as she maintains dueling narratives in alternating chapters—one taking place twenty years before the other—framing events that took place before either epoch with appropriate context. This is especially difficult when you have an A.I. narrator who often times has possession of multiple bodies at once and is capable of living for a thousand years.
The biggest piece of the world-building pie belongs to the Radchaai: a frighteningly monolithic civilization that envelops other cultures into their own through a lengthy (and sometimes messy) process called “annexation.” The culture of the Radchaai is central to making the universe feel tangible; Leckie covers everything from their color-coded uniforms and traditional foods to their fascinating methods of worship and language…
The Radchaai language, as it turns out, is not concerned with gender. There will be occasional markers, but otherwise most of the characters are not specifically gendered. Leckie will drop a hint here or there when a character speaks in a different language or when Breq (the aforementioned A.I.) fears using the wrong descriptor, but I can honestly say I am not one hundred percent sure of most of the character’s genders. Is that problematic? Well, it could be depending on what sort of reader you are. But I believe what Leckie achieves is forcing you to think like a Radchaai. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fit into their society. Radchaai are much more concerned with class (and hands, they have a thing with bare hands) as derived from the status of one’s house—not dissimilar to Dune. It is a nuanced, inventive vision of culture all because of the removal of a social construct many take for granted.
What I assumed from the back cover would be a fairly stock-standard military space opera (Ooo an A.I. narrator!) became a wonderfully cerebral examination of culture, gender, and identity. I know I just used it for a joke, but the writing around one who is comprised of multiple bodies and near infinite computational potential is much clearer than you’d expect. This book is illuminating, challenging, and well worth the effort; Ann Leckie has gained an impassioned fan in me.
The Booklog
So, I’m building a tomb of books in my room. No, seriously. Nestled in the the corner of my relatively small room sits a four shelf bookcase from (where else) Ikea. Every shelf is filled to bursting; most shelves are double stuffed like some sort of literary cookie. Balanced on top if it sits four columns each boasting about twenty books or so. You get it, I have a lot books. What’s scarier than the idea of those books tumbling on top of me while I’m writing this and burying me for future archaeologists to discover (note to self: set browser history to auto delete upon my death) is what those tomes represent: my backlog.
If your hobby includes some kind of media consumption in the year of our internet lords, two thousand and seventeen, then you probably have a backlog. Oh, it starts so innocently: you grab a few books on a Barnes and Noble holiday sale, “Just enough to fill the shelves!” you lied lyingly. Suddenly it’s 3 AM and you decide to Google “best sci-fi series of alllll time” just to get a feel, a taste really, of what the critical collective thinks you were a laughable fool for missing out on. “Oh, Dune,” you say, “I’ve been meaning to read that!” And you have. But how many books are in the series? At least 6? Why, just having the first one won’t do at all! What if you like it and need to devour the next one? Wait a week for Amazon to chuck it on (or near) your doorstep? Not in this day and age. I want those glossy paperbacks yesterday.
Enabled by sites like Goodreads, Amazon, getting “ads” directly from the publishers on social media, and recommendations from friends it’s surprisingly easy to build up an intimidating backlog. But really, it’s nothing to be afraid of. What’s that your parental figure/hackneyed coming-of-age film is always telling you? Life is about the journey? Something like that. Your book backlog is just the life of your reading habits. There doesn’t need to be a discernible end to your backlog. Ever. It’s never been easier to keep track of your magpie-like habit, and I make full use of my “Want to Read” shelf on Goodreads, an Amazon wishlist(see, we came full circle), and a few desktop sticky notes that encompass what I have (charmingly) termed my “Book Hit List.” Goodreads even gamifies the whole experience by having you pledge a target amount of books, while displaying a progress bar as you marathon read, AND using some kind of fancy space math to tell you how many books you’re behind on! How…thoughtful.
There is a deeper issue here though, isn’t there? Am I reading to sate my inner completionist; just to tick a box while simultaneously giving me the ability to answer “Why yes I have read Infinite Jest, Derek, get off my back!” Shouldn’t I just read for my own enjoyment and enrichment? Well, it depends. I like being able to tick boxes, it’s a very atavistic response to tasks, but I also bond with the literature and the characters contained therein. I genuinely care about what happens to the crew of the Rocinante or the denizens of Discworld. As long as you don’t find yourself furiously paging through a novel that you’re miserable with at 4 AM just to say you’ve shoveled through part of that backlog then feel free double-fist that cake you have.
Besides, it’s not like you want to save money or anything, right? That’s a sucker’s game.
Sure, let’s add yet another book to my “currently reading” pile. Take comfort in whatever world you can these days. #books #literature
Well, it took some time and patience but the Explorer’s Edition of No Man’s Sky finally arrived. #nomanssky #space
The goings-on of a madman. #literature #nightvale
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