Category: reviews (Page 6 of 12)

Hugo reading 2018: Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeanette Ng

June 3, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Jeanette Ng was nominated for a Campbell Award for her novel, Under the Pendulum Sun. This was a very good novel, and I should have liked it, but I didn’t.

It’s set in an alternate Victorian England, which has recently discovered Faerie, and the story starts when Catherine Helstone goes looking for her brother, Laon, a missionary who has been trying to evangelise the Faerie realm. Faerie and its inhabitants are as they should be – strange, capricious, dangerous, and subject to a logic and laws that make no sense to human minds. They also seem to derive particular pleasure from mentally torturing the humans they manage to lure into their lands, which makes for some very disturbing reading.

The imagery is gorgeous and fascinating. I especially like the sea whales who float through the air and contain entire ocean ecosystems in their transparent bodies. Overall, the story has quite a gothic sensibility, right down to the mysterious madwoman lurking around the castle muttering strange things. Andrew reckons the main characters are based on two of the Bronte sibling, but I’m not so sure.

I found the plot rather dark for my taste, and I’m really not convinced that a Victorian missionary who had gone to Faerie specifically to avoid a particular sexual temptation, and who clearly takes his vocation seriously, would so easily and without any apparent sense of guilt give in to a different, but similar, temptation later on. Andrew again claims that it’s a Bronte thing, but I’m not convinced; the whole attitude to sex seemed very un-Victorian to me, frankly. There’s some interesting theology that really can’t be discussed without spoiling all the way to the last page – I’m not sure how much I agree with it, but it does fit the setting and the world.

Also, there is some stuff that is really going to squick some people, but it’s spoilerish so I’m putting it in yellow so that you will have to highlight it to read it.

There is SO MUCH incest in this story. Really, a lot. It’s consensual, happy incest – Catherine and Laon are the central pairing, and their relationship is very much a romantic one, and one that the story seems to approve of, in the end – but for me, that did not make it any less squicky and unpleasant to read. And, to me, it felt out of character given how seriously both characters took their religious convictions.

Overall, I think this is a very good novel, and definitely deserves to be on this list. But it’s really not to my taste, which is a pity, because I really wanted it to be.

Hugo reading 2018: A Series of Steaks, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

June 3, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

“A Series of Steaks” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad is just a world of fun. In it, we meet Helena, an artist in 3D printing, which in this world can be used for everything from making meat from animal cells, to creating replacement organs for human beings.

Helena… started off on the latter track, but after a catastrophe, she found herself on the run from a powerful family, and had to change her name and go underground. She now makes a living forging steaks, something which is apparently illegal in this world. When she is blackmailed into forging a large order of T-bone steaks, she hires an assistant, Lily, who is perky and energetic and very competent, and who has, shall we say, hidden depths. I sort of want to be Lily when I grow up…

I don’t want to say too much about this story, because it’s too delicious to spoil. It has moments of darkness – I mean, technically you might say it was in the noir genre – but the relationships between the central characters are delightful. I also really appreciated the description of the artistry involved in forging meat – making sure the marbling is just random enough to look real, but not so random that it no longer looks organic, for example – not to mention the anatomical knowledge required to put a steak together that looks and behaves like a steak.

Also, did I mention that I adored both Helena and Lily?

I found myself chortling with glee as the story wound towards its conclusions. Highly recommended.

Prasad was nominated for a Campbell Award, and this was part of her voter pack, alongside her short story, Fandom for Robots, which was also enormous fun. I’ve put her high wherever I’ve seen her on the ballot, and hope to read more of her.

Hugo reading 2018: Best Fan Artist category

June 1, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

OK, on to the Best Fan Artist, where similar caveats apply – I know nothing about art, but I know what I like. And I have a ballot, and I’m not afraid to use it…

Geneva Benton – I rather like these. They are playful and colourful and sweet. And they feel very fan-art to me, though I couldn’t express why. I like the third one, where she is doing a bit of a riff on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but with a black woman. Andrew reckons colours and style of art in that particular picture is reminiscent of the 70s soul funk vibe you get in blaxploitation films, and someone is clearly taking this whole section a lot more seriously than I am…

Grace Fong – does nothing for me. Most of her pictures are of figures and are almost photorealistic. Quite cold. They don’t appeal to Andrew either.

Likhain knows what I like, and what I like is all the colours all the time. Beautiful, vivid work. Detailed and tentacular. Andrew suspects African influence. I just know that my inner three year old is really happy right now.

Maya Hahto – mostly does pictures of bears. Very nice bears. Friendly bears. Bears who I would like to meet. Also a nice portrait of Maya Hahto, which is very expressive. I quite like this. Also, bears. Andrew seems moderately approving too.

Spring Schoenhuth – makes fan jewelry rather than fanart. Andrew: “Seems fine”. That’s about how I feel, too.

Steve Stiles – bright and cartoonish. Not really my style. Andrew reckons he’s riffing on different things, but they aren’t things I recognise.

My ballot is Likhain, Benton, Hahto, Stiles, Fong, Schoenhuth

Andrew’s ballot is Likhain, Stiles, Benton, Hahto, Fong, Schoenhuth

Hugo reading 2018: Best Professional Artist Category

June 1, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Since I’m basically aesthetically challenge and don’t know what to do in an art gallery, I’m judging this category first and in conjunction with my husband, Andrew (who has a lot more opinions on this sort of thing than I do). Also, I know this category won’t take me long, because when you really know nothing about art, it doesn’t take long to go ‘ooh pretty’ or ‘nope, not my thing’.

In other words, I am a philistine. But I am a philistine who votes! So here we go!

Bastien Lecouffe Deharme has provided six works. They are in a sort of oil painting style, and he likes an aesthetic I think of as a bit renaissance/ Dutch master, which has lots of deep shadows and use of light. Two of them I really like, and a third is very good. Three of them are absolutely generic fantasy covers. Andrew thinks the ones I liked remind him a bit of artists like Brom or Michael Whelan.

Galen Dara feels a bit Art Nouveau, if Art Nouveau had a lot more aqua in it. His work is a bit more stylised, but I like the movement in some of his figures. Andrew thinks I am thinking of Alphonse Mucha, and now that I look at what he has googled, I think he’s right. He also detects similarities with Frazer Irving. He also likes the use of shapes and colour. (Note that Andrew will always be biased in favour of an artist who uses a lot of aqua.) (Note that Andrew objects to this characterisation.). We both really like the silhouetted girl dancing with fairies. I like five out of six of these, and love three of them.

John Picacio does nice, realist artwork, but it leaves me cold. Andrew likes some of them, especially the girl with wings and the spider girl. He also reckons that Picacio is more technically consistent than Dara or Deharme. But a lot of it doesn’t grab him either.

Kathleen Jennings is riffing on children’s book illustrations from the Edwardian era. Each picture is in a different style, so a couple of them evoke Beardsley, others feel very E.H. Shepherd, another Beatrix Potter. We both adore all of them. Just gorgeous, delicate, perfect work. But I have a thing for silhouettes.

Sana Takeda does beautiful, very detailed pen and ink work with a wash of colour. We get some Monstress art, some Dark Crystal art, and a portrait of Sherlock and Watson, a la Cumberbatch and Freeman. It’s lovely stuff, but doesn’t capture my heart quite to the extent that Jennings does. Andrew reckons she comes from a modern Japanese comic art background, but with a strong western inflection.

Victo Ngai comes endorsed by Andrew, who apparently nominated him on my behalf (I gave Andrew free rein over the Hugo sections that I had no opinion about). He’s rather lovely, and again, fairly Beardsley. He has read books entirely based on Ngai’s artwork on the cover (Andrew says not entirely, but it was the art that got his attention).

My ballot goes Jennings, Ngai, Takeda, Dara, Deharme, Picacio. It’s possible that Ngai and Takeda are better artists than Jennings, but I *loved* Jennings’ illustrations, and very little visual art evokes that kind of emotion in me.

Andrew’s ballot goes Ngai, Takeda, Dara, Deharme, Jennings, Picacio. This is because he is wrong. (Andrew claims that this is no reflection on the artists’ skill, but is a reflection of personal taste. Andrew’s personal taste is clearly dreadful.)

Fan artists to follow!

Review: As You Like It and Henry V at the Pop Up Globe

January 3, 2018 / Catherine / 1 Comment

Our Christmas present to each other this year was a day at the Pop Up Globe in Melbourne. Originally, the plan had been to see Around the Globe in 60 Minutes at 11, As You Like It at 2:00 and Henry V at 7:30 – which is a lot of plays, but how often does one get the opportunity to see that much Shakespeare and Shakespeare-adjacent theatre in one sitting? Alas, the Around the Globe show was cancelled at the last minute – but this may have been for the best, because our seats (in the Lower Gallery) were *exceedingly* hard and uncomfortable, and in fact the twinges in my buttocks and lower back kept me awake for quite a bit of last night.

The seating, however, was really my only complaint.

As You Like It was great fun. It was very lively and raunchy, full of music, and they did not miss any opportunities for humour, the naughtier the better. They also did not miss any opportunity to involve the groundlings in the story – in Touchstone’s early speech about the knight who swore by his honour that the pancakes were good and the vegemite was nought, he pointed at said ‘knight’ in the audience, and from then on, he had a constant rivalry with the dishonorable Sir Jarrod. He also had a romance going on with Lady Jane. A woman in the audience became the missing maidservant who had found the girls’ beds un-slept in, and had to answer for their absence, other audience members were singled out to represent other characters or character traits, to be hidden behind, or appealed to, to be the flock of goats, or to illustrate the Jaques’ seven ages of man speech. Any time people of low estate were mentioned, there was a gesture to the groundlings (we in the galleries were the nobility, of course).

Of course, the groundlings also got water squirted at them and paper torn up and thrown at them, and learned to back away FAST whenever the clown was on stage, as he had a tendency to spit ‘teeth’ or to ‘vomit’ water into the audience at every opportunity.

But what was really interesting about this performance was that they made the decision to have all the parts played by men, as they would have been in Shakespeare’s time.

Hugo reading 2017: Three Parts Dead, by Matt Gladstone

July 14, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

The concluding episode in my Hugo reading marathon! Huzzah!

The Craft Sequence, by Matt Gladstone, consists of five novels so far. We get all of them in the Hugo Voter Pack, and, due to time constraints, I have read only the first one.

By which I mean, I have read the third one, Three Parts Dead..

Gladstone provides us with a rather endearing introduction (this one, more or less) at the start of his omnibus, explaining that he wanted to explore different cities and cultures in his world, from the point of view of the people who lived in them, rather than having his protagonists journey from place to place, interacting with it. So rather than doing a consecutive series featuring the same characters, he wrote five books set in the same world, and planned for each of them to stand alone. And he started writing in the middle, in terms of the world’s history, so he numbered that book three (he also, helpfully, made sure that each book had a number in its title, so that people could easily figure out the chronology).

For reasons that I’m not entirely sure I understand, he decided to set out the omnibus in publication order, not chronological order. Hence, I read the third one, which is also the first one, and which is called Three Parts Dead.

This is a world which is recovering from the God Wars. It’s not entirely clear exactly what happened in these wars, but it seems that the Gods fought the Craftsmen and Craftswomen, and many of them perished in the fight. Craftsmen are necromancers and lawyers; the Gods have amazing powers, but these tend to be controlled by contracts with other Gods, cities, or undying Kings. When they die, they can, in some circumstances, be resurrected, zombie-like, to fulfil their contracts in particular ways, but they aren’t really themselves anymore. It’s fascinating, convoluted, and confusing.

At the beginning of this story, Kos Everburning, the God who rules and protects Alt Coloumb (I had a lot of trouble with that name, it kept making me think of Control-Alt-Delete, or Alt-Right), is dead, possibly murdered. Tara, who has just begun working for the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, and her supervisor, Ms Kevarian are contracted to defend Kos in court, and make a case for his resurrection. He needs defending, because if he has died due to negligence in his contracts, then he is liable to his various debtors. Their opponent is Tara’s former Professor and nemesis, Denovo, who was also responsible for turning the city’s former moon goddess, and Kos’s consort, Seril, into Justice forty years earlier. Justice contains Seril’s power, but none of her personality or her spirit – this is a worst-case-scenario for a resurrected God.

The plot is complicated, and we mostly see it through the eyes of Tara, the junior necromancer, and Abelard, a novice priest of Kos, and the one who was on altar duty when Kos died. The magic is quite horrifying. For example, we occasionally see the world through the eyes of Catherine Elle, who works as a Blacksuit – one of Justice’s minions. Blacksuits have no will of their own when they are on duty, and are controlled absolutely by Justice. This is something of a high, and whenever Catherine is off duty, she seeks other sources for the high, which… is often not ideal.

I don’t really know how to review this book. It’s hard to unpick it at the edges without risking unravelling it completely. It’s complex, and cleverly thought out, and full of politics, the characterisation is great, there are moments of dry humour, and the ending is satisfying – though it did require a fair bit of the aftermath and prologue to make sense of what had happened. Also, Gladstone managed to make the ending work without cheating, which I initially thought he had done.

I’ll definitely be reading the other books, and I’m now trying to decide whether this goes below or above October Daye on my ballot. It’s definitely less dark, which is a plus; on the other hand, I know all the October Daye books are pretty good, and I don’t know where this series goes from here.

On reflection, I think my ballot goes Vorkosigan, Craft Sequence, Temeraire, October Daye, Rivers of London, The Expanse. Temeraire might have been more fun than the Craft Sequence, but I think this was much cleverer.

Here ends the Hugo reading for 2017! I may read the zines for my own interest, but there’s no way I’m going to have time to review them. And it would be nice to read something for enjoyment, rather than critically and with the intent to compare it with everything else on the ballot.

Hugo reading 2017: Best Series

July 14, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

“What’s this?”, you say? “Best series? What happened to best novel?”

Well. I was supposed to read Becky Chambers’ book, A Closed and Common Orbit next, but I just thought I’d have a teensy look at the first book in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, His Majesty’s Dragon, and the next thing I knew it was 2am and I was 200+ pages in and realising that I had to work in the morning.

(OK, I realised that well before this point, but I just didn’t care…)

So I wound up reading that first. A quick note on the Best Series for me, by the way. I’ve actually read everything in three of the series (serieses?) nominated this year, so I already know how they are ranked in relation to each other, and will write about them briefly here, but it’s hard to review an entire series, so I probably can’t do them justice.

Hugo reading 2017: A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers

July 13, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Last novel! Hooray! And I liked this one quite a lot, which means that now I have a problem at the top of my ballot…

But let’s get on with the book.

A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers, is a very sweet, kindly sort of book. It feels like an epilogue, and I believe it takes place after another book set in the same universe. There is not, now I think about it, a lot of obvious conflict. It still kept me reading until after 1am on a work night because I needed to know what happened to everyone.

The book tells two stories in parallel. The first story centres around Lovelace / Sidra, a ship’s artificial intelligence system who is now trapped in a synthetic human body. And she does feel trapped by it – she no longer has unlimited memory and access to the Linkages, which seem to be a futuristic extrapolation of the world wide web. Her narrative arc is partly about coming to terms with her situation and figuring out how people who are not AIs (humans or aliens) work, and partly about her remaking her situation to a point where she can be content with it and have a purpose that appeals to her.

She is helped in this by Pepper, an engineer who was once a slave called Jane 23, and the second story is hers. This story starts when Jane 23 is ten, and, almost accidentally, escapes the factory which has been her entire world (quite literally – she does not know what the sky is, and is alarmed by this gigantic ‘room’ without walls). Running from feral dogs, Jane 23 is rescued by a stranded spaceship and its AI, Owl. Owl takes her in, and… basically teaches her how to be human. And, over time, how to repair the ship and get off this planet. This may sound unlikely, but Jane has been working to sort and repair broken machinery for her entire life as a slave, so while she has few other skills, she is very, very good with engineering. I must admit, while I liked Sidra a lot, and sympathised with her struggles, it was Jane’s story that kept me up until 1am wondering if – and how – she would be OK.

Note that Jane’s story is fairly disturbing – the treatment of the child slaves is chilling (we never do find out what happens when they turn twelve, but I suspect they are killed at that point), and she spends years scavenging for metal and for food, and mostly killing and eating feral dogs. Which is something you may have a visceral reaction to. (I just tried replacing feral dogs with feral cats in that sentence and was completely horrified and grossed out, so, yeah.)

With half the story being about an AI raised by humans and the other half about a human raised by an AI, Chambers is clearly saying a few things about what makes us human, but I’m not entirely sure what those things are. It’s clear that humanity is not limited to humans; the AI, Owl, is clearly appalled by Jane 23’s treatment, which, while it was at the hands of AIs called the Mothers, is clearly something that was decided and organised by the humans. Compassion, empathy and friendship, are clearly important things, and things that AIs can share with humans and aliens. Another important thread is the ability to lie, something that Sidra can’t do at the start of the story due to programming limitations. Once she is able to do so, it seemed to me that her relationships with humans and aliens changed for the better. But it is clear that AIs have free will, at least to an extent. Sidra can choose what she wants to do and how to spend her time, provided it does not go against one of her programming restrictions.

I don’t know where to put this book on the ballot. It was far and away the most enjoyable one to read of the novels in this category, but I don’t think that it was as creative as Ninefox Gambit or The Obelisk Gate. I still want to put it at the top of the list, because I want to encourage books that I enjoy reading. But I’m not sure if it ought to be first or second. Then again, I suspect a LOT of people will put Ninefox Gambit first (I’m expecting that one to win, actually), so maybe it doesn’t need my vote? I shall have to ponder this.

Hugo reading 2017: Foz Meadows

July 11, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Last of all of the fan writers is Foz Meadows, who has provided us with four nice, long essays in her Hugo Voter Packet.

Bad TV Romance: Could you not?

Her thesis here is that TV writers pretty much feed M/M slashfic in three ways: by making male/female relationships predictably oriented around whether they will get together romantically; by avoiding platonic female/male relationships in order not to distract from the central romance; and by having relatively few female characters anyway, so your same sex interactions tend to be M/M.

“Thus: having firmly invested your audience in the importance of a romantic relationship, you then proceed to use all the juiciest romantic foundations – which is to say, shared interests, complex histories, mutual respect, in-jokes, magnetic antagonism, slowly-kindled alliances and a dozen other things – in male/male scenes and then affect gaping surprise when your fan base not only notices, but expresses a preference for it.”

I think she hits the nail on the head there.

She also queries why ‘will they, won’t they’ is the default, and suggests that this is rooted in an idea that having romance as a primary narrative is too feminine and thus devalued. As a romance reader, I can only nod along wisely and sadly.

It’s a good essay, and pointed out several things I hadn’t thought of before.

Dragon Age: Meta, thoughts and feelings

This is mostly a post about a video game, and since I don’t play video games, it’s a bit lost on me. Foz talks about the delight of getting to play a queer character in a video game. She then talks about the game’s portrayal of slavery, of race, of terrorism, and also about the game’s implicit biases.

It’s a strange and illuminating article. I didn’t know there was so much storytelling in video games, or that romantic relationships were a big part of them. I didn’t get a lot out of it – it’s hard when someone is writing in depth about issues with something you’ve never heard of – but it’s a good piece, even if it isn’t for me.

Diversity: more than white women

This piece talks about how women tend to be pitted against each other in media – put explicitly or implicitly in competition for the heroes or for the audience – and how this comes from an idea that telling stories about people other than straight white men is doomed to failure. All other characters exist only in relation to them.

Meadows points out that while this is slowly improving for white women, it’s not working so well for other groups. And that when other minorities appear on shows, they get killed off at a much higher rate. I hadn’t realised that the old motion picture production code actually required depictions of queerness to end in tragedy (so that viewers would not think that queerness was acceptable). Of course, this is no longer the case, but people still tend to do it.

Gentleman Jole and the Vorkosigan Saga: Thoughts

Oh, this is fun! Meadows starts by comparing the revelations about the central relationship in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen with the fanfic written by my friend Dira Sudis – hooray, I have read both the novel and the fanfic! – and then she goes back and traces Joel’s appearances in previous Vorkosigan books, pointing out the hints that one can find, if one knows what one is looking for (or if one is as clever and intuitive as Dira Sudis evidently is), that suggest that Bujold planned this quite some time ago.

Meadows then moves on to talking about the women in Bujold, and honestly, I’m just having a heap of fun now, and not reading critically at all. I love her vision of Gentleman Jole as the final, cathartic, closing bracket of the story which started in Shards of Honor. Miles takes over for so long that one can forget that Cordelia was the protagonist first, and the voice which carried us into the series. Reading this essay makes me realise that Gentleman Jole probably is the last word from Barrayar (though Meadows doesn’t think so). Cordelia’s story is complete, and it was her story to start with.

I love this essay. It makes me want to go read the whole Vorkosigan saga again, which is never a bad thing.

And now I’m conflicted about where to put Meadows on my ballot. I loved Luhrmann’s essay about romance; I loved Meadows’ essay about Bujold, and I think by now everyone knows how I feel about Chuck Tingle. I think I shall stubbornly put Tingle first, and Meadows second, with Luhrmann coming in at third and Nussbaum at fourth. I wish I could somehow indicate the big gap between fourth and fifth place on my ballot, but it isn’t a No Award-sized gap, so the rankings will just have to speak for themselves.

And here endeth the Best Fan Writer reviews! One more novel, and then a quick fly through the voter packets for the three series that I haven’t read yet, and I’m done!

Hugo reading 2017: Mike Glyer / File 770

July 11, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Fan Writer number 5 is Mike Glyer, who writes File 770.

His Voter Pack starts with two brief articles from File 770, one about terrible holiday ornaments on sale in July, and one about why we shouldn’t erase people who finished below No Award in the Hugos from the nomination list (his argument amounts to – not everyone who has ever finished behind No Award is a puppy, and also, we should acknowledge our history.

He then provides us with a couple of obituaries he wrote last year, one for Bill Warren and the other for Ed Dravecky. They are very nice obituaries. I didn’t know anything about either man, and now I know a little. I don’t really know what else to say about these.

And… that’s all, apparently.

It’s perfectly serviceable writing. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s also nothing much that holds my attention. It goes above Puppy Jeffro Johnson and No Award, but below Tingle, Luhrs, and Nussbaum, all of whom provided me with far more entertainment.