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Mar. 18th, 2010 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Finished: Sun of Suns (Book One of Virga), by Karl Schroeder (reread)
Started: Queen of Candesce (Book Two of Virga), by Karl Schroeder (reread)
It's a reread, so I don't really have extended comments. I still quite enjoyed it, it's a light actiony tale of navies and pirates and towns made of wood spun for gravity, with some cool SF ideas thrown in the mix.
Finished: Shadow's Bend, by David Barbour and Richard Raleigh
So, Shadow's Bend is a story of real life pen pals (who came close but never actually met in person) HP Lovecraft (creator of Cthulhu and such) and Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan), on an adventure and road trip when Lovecraft comes across an artifact that suggests the otherworldly horrors in his stories may be true. A kind of irresistable premise. So how was the book? Ehh. There were a few good moments, but mostly it read like long fan fiction, and not especially good fan fiction. More detailed, with a few spoilers, behind the cut.
The two main characters are real people, so naturally they include another character for them to bounce off them... and it's "the whore with the heart of gold", one of the oldest cliches in the character world. And as a character she's relatively fine except being obvious plot bait and being super educated (in the 1930s) about lots of different areas, etc. Not really a huge problem, but it was hard to get connected to her.
It's not great in many ways, but I think the biggest problem is the plot itself. Writing lovecraftian horrors is always going to be hard, but when you add two people who shouldn't be fighting them, the restriction that they have to survive the adventure (because it's presented as 'the never before known story (wink wink)' rather than 'an alternate history'), the road trip format, you have to do some deft writing. Instead, most of the time, it's like a few scary things happen randomly with no rhyme or reason, just whenever they need a scary point. I was reading reviews about it to see if I was being too hard on it, and I found a point that I didn't articulate but agree with: It seems like the horrors the two are (very slowly) running from in their attempt to destroy the artifact would have been better off just hanging back and not doing anything threatening at all, since they seem to want them to do exactly what they're trying to do anyway. So it's like cosmic horrors just, every once in a while, just come up to shout BOOGEDY BOOGEDY and then go away, or lurk behind the protagonists and attack witnesses and lurk around discarded cans of beans to convince the reader they're SERIOUS BUSINESS. I never got a sense of the cosmic horror though.
Plot elements get set up hamfistedly. An old Hopi shaman who knows exactly what's going to happen because his family's had visions of it for a century, and tells them pretty much where to go next and what to do while there and foreshadowing the obvious fate of another character, and removing most of the tension of the book ("Oh, so you've seen all this and what they have to do? I guess what they do doesn't really matter then because all of this has been preordained"... it's not played for horror as that type of plot can be in Lovecraft. Or "Yeah, you're going into a set of twisty passages all alike, and are likely to be touched by a grue, but don't worry, when the time comes you'll remember this map I made you like it was yesterday".
So, yeah, plot-wise, I was not engaged at all. I never really cared what happened next because it never felt like it mattered much.
Of the good points, most of the time the author did a nice job of portraying Lovecraft as the quirky character I'd always heard he was and assumed him to be. I know less about what Robert E. Howard was supposed to be like, and he came off a little less well - I get the feeling the authort wanted to tie the author to his writings more and so made him a bit more like a Texan Conan at times. Also interesting is details of the people's lives. For example, I had no idea that Robert E. Howard committed suicide.
Started and Finished: Midshipman's Hope,, by David Feintuch (reread)
Started: Challenger's Hope,, by David Feintuch (reread)
There is something so cracky about this series. I really shouldn't reread it as much as I have, and what's more, I really shouldn't COMPULSIVELY keep reading. It's one of the few books that I'll usually pick up at home just to get to the next part. And it makes no sense. It's not bad, but it's not especially, objectively, good either. It's set in a future in which there's been a big conservative backlash, Church and State are in bed, and because journey's between colonies takes about a year and a half, the Captain of U.N. Naval vessels (as lone representatives of the government) have extreme powers up to and including ordering hanging, impressing people into a five year term of enlistment in an emergency, etc. The Navy runs something like out of the Napoleonic era. Midshipmen are regularly caned if they get too far out of line because it builds discipline. And a main character who's decent, honorable, religious, has daddy issues up the wazoo, and sworn to uphold his oath to the Navy despite quite often being thrust into impossible situations, over the course of the series having virtually every bad thing happen to him and the people he cares about, regularly handing out canings and hating himself for doing so even as others (including the caned) come to love him for it. He's almost a Mary Sue (albeit a badly abused one), especially with the idea of the first book, where he's a 17 year old Midshipman who, through a series of tragic accidents, winds up being the highest ranking line officer and so forced to become Captain mid-voyage, and the regulations don't permit him to resign and let a more qualified person take over. Even when he makes a mistake it usually turns out to be for the best in the end (or it's a totally forgiveable mistake that leads to the death of someone he cares about). Yet I can't stop reading them once I start. I guess there's something about a world, as constructed as it is, where always keeping your oath and following regulations even when you don't want to, can make everything turn out all right.
So, since I've started I'll probably be reading these for a while.
...
Anyway, speaking of books and writing, it looks like I probably will not be attending one of those writer's workshops after all. But at least it's not due to my own cowardice. Apparently, I didn't even know signups had started for the workshops, and they're already all full up. Oh well. I probably would have backed out for other reasons (if you needed a laptop or something I couldn't go anyway), though a part of me did want to meet other aspiring writers in the area and perhaps set up some contacts.
TV-wise, Caprica's still going good. Only a couple weeks till new Who, and Stargate Universe is going to be back again soonish I think. Looking forward to both. Lost, though, has been a disappointment. (spoilers ahoy). The main plot on the island is okay, but I've really lost interest in the Flashsideways. I said it before, but they REALLY need to signal to the audience in some obvious way that this actually MATTERS in some way. In the Flashbacks, WHILE we watched them, we knew they mattered, because we knew this was about the characters, revealing the mysteries we didn't know. In the Flashfowards, WHILE we watched them, we knew they mattered, because they revealed where the plot on the island was leading up to. The flashsideways? WHILE we watch them, we don't know. All we know is we're seeing what life might have been like for the characters if the island sank. But we don't know it MATTERS. It could just be "oh, you like these characters? Here's some other stories involving them." It could be "We're out of ideas so we're just going to show you what might have happened in an alternate world, because the characters actions last year ripped history in two." Or it could be something like "this alternate world has real impact on what's happened or going to happen." I hope it's that. But they really need to signal it because it's hard to care when there are so many ways the story might not matter. A couple episodes of it might have been okay, but not half the season, and certainly not the whole season. If we go through a whole season and only find up what's up with the flashsideways in the finale, this season is fail, no matter how good the explanation is. They need to connect the two plots ASAP. Have Desmond or Faraday show up, babbling about alternate timelines. SOMETHING. MAKE ME CARE WHILE I'M WATCHING IT, DAMNIT. DON'T MAKE ME WONDER IF IN TWO MONTHS I SHOULD HAVE RETROACTIVELY CARED.
Sigh.
Oh, and this was on Writer's Block a while back, and liked it, so I'm posting it:
If the interior discussion in your head were indexed by category, what would the five most recurring subjects be?
1. Writing. Plot ideas mostly, but some characters, lines of dialog, etc. Mostly my own stuff, some just ideas for cracky pointless fanficy stuff that I'll never actually write down (What if Veronica Mars joined the Stargate program), but I put it all under writing. I'll put my What I'd Do With series here too, even if I haven't had one in a while.
2. Imaginary conversations. Things I either wish I had said to somebody in a past case, or what I wish I could say to somebody, or what I might say in the event somebody asked me something that they are unlikely ever to ask.
3. Not quite the same as #1, but semi-daydreaming myself in various situations... having super powers, being lost in another world, being in a zombie apocalypse, or being in the situation of another book.
4. TV/Books, what I think might happen or what I think is wrong with them now or the particular things I like about them.
5. Self-loathing
5 sometimes moves up the list depending on the time of year. So yeah, I spend a lot of time in the land of imagination.
In "things breaking" news, you know my computer? The one I bought... oh, about a year and a month ago I think. No, it's okay. But the new keyboard that came with it spazzed out and died on me. So I went back to the one I'd had about 4 years before that. I guess they really don't make them like they used to. Edit: And meanwhile, my OTHER computer's keyboard, which is even older... has spontaneously HEALED itself. Before, the home and end keys didn't work. Not a big problem, but annoying. Now they do. WTF?
And while writing this entry, I turned my head in apparently what was the wrong direction and now my neck is sore and stiff. :P. Alas.
Started: Queen of Candesce (Book Two of Virga), by Karl Schroeder (reread)
It's a reread, so I don't really have extended comments. I still quite enjoyed it, it's a light actiony tale of navies and pirates and towns made of wood spun for gravity, with some cool SF ideas thrown in the mix.
Finished: Shadow's Bend, by David Barbour and Richard Raleigh
So, Shadow's Bend is a story of real life pen pals (who came close but never actually met in person) HP Lovecraft (creator of Cthulhu and such) and Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan), on an adventure and road trip when Lovecraft comes across an artifact that suggests the otherworldly horrors in his stories may be true. A kind of irresistable premise. So how was the book? Ehh. There were a few good moments, but mostly it read like long fan fiction, and not especially good fan fiction. More detailed, with a few spoilers, behind the cut.
The two main characters are real people, so naturally they include another character for them to bounce off them... and it's "the whore with the heart of gold", one of the oldest cliches in the character world. And as a character she's relatively fine except being obvious plot bait and being super educated (in the 1930s) about lots of different areas, etc. Not really a huge problem, but it was hard to get connected to her.
It's not great in many ways, but I think the biggest problem is the plot itself. Writing lovecraftian horrors is always going to be hard, but when you add two people who shouldn't be fighting them, the restriction that they have to survive the adventure (because it's presented as 'the never before known story (wink wink)' rather than 'an alternate history'), the road trip format, you have to do some deft writing. Instead, most of the time, it's like a few scary things happen randomly with no rhyme or reason, just whenever they need a scary point. I was reading reviews about it to see if I was being too hard on it, and I found a point that I didn't articulate but agree with: It seems like the horrors the two are (very slowly) running from in their attempt to destroy the artifact would have been better off just hanging back and not doing anything threatening at all, since they seem to want them to do exactly what they're trying to do anyway. So it's like cosmic horrors just, every once in a while, just come up to shout BOOGEDY BOOGEDY and then go away, or lurk behind the protagonists and attack witnesses and lurk around discarded cans of beans to convince the reader they're SERIOUS BUSINESS. I never got a sense of the cosmic horror though.
Plot elements get set up hamfistedly. An old Hopi shaman who knows exactly what's going to happen because his family's had visions of it for a century, and tells them pretty much where to go next and what to do while there and foreshadowing the obvious fate of another character, and removing most of the tension of the book ("Oh, so you've seen all this and what they have to do? I guess what they do doesn't really matter then because all of this has been preordained"... it's not played for horror as that type of plot can be in Lovecraft. Or "Yeah, you're going into a set of twisty passages all alike, and are likely to be touched by a grue, but don't worry, when the time comes you'll remember this map I made you like it was yesterday".
So, yeah, plot-wise, I was not engaged at all. I never really cared what happened next because it never felt like it mattered much.
Of the good points, most of the time the author did a nice job of portraying Lovecraft as the quirky character I'd always heard he was and assumed him to be. I know less about what Robert E. Howard was supposed to be like, and he came off a little less well - I get the feeling the authort wanted to tie the author to his writings more and so made him a bit more like a Texan Conan at times. Also interesting is details of the people's lives. For example, I had no idea that Robert E. Howard committed suicide.
Started and Finished: Midshipman's Hope,, by David Feintuch (reread)
Started: Challenger's Hope,, by David Feintuch (reread)
There is something so cracky about this series. I really shouldn't reread it as much as I have, and what's more, I really shouldn't COMPULSIVELY keep reading. It's one of the few books that I'll usually pick up at home just to get to the next part. And it makes no sense. It's not bad, but it's not especially, objectively, good either. It's set in a future in which there's been a big conservative backlash, Church and State are in bed, and because journey's between colonies takes about a year and a half, the Captain of U.N. Naval vessels (as lone representatives of the government) have extreme powers up to and including ordering hanging, impressing people into a five year term of enlistment in an emergency, etc. The Navy runs something like out of the Napoleonic era. Midshipmen are regularly caned if they get too far out of line because it builds discipline. And a main character who's decent, honorable, religious, has daddy issues up the wazoo, and sworn to uphold his oath to the Navy despite quite often being thrust into impossible situations, over the course of the series having virtually every bad thing happen to him and the people he cares about, regularly handing out canings and hating himself for doing so even as others (including the caned) come to love him for it. He's almost a Mary Sue (albeit a badly abused one), especially with the idea of the first book, where he's a 17 year old Midshipman who, through a series of tragic accidents, winds up being the highest ranking line officer and so forced to become Captain mid-voyage, and the regulations don't permit him to resign and let a more qualified person take over. Even when he makes a mistake it usually turns out to be for the best in the end (or it's a totally forgiveable mistake that leads to the death of someone he cares about). Yet I can't stop reading them once I start. I guess there's something about a world, as constructed as it is, where always keeping your oath and following regulations even when you don't want to, can make everything turn out all right.
So, since I've started I'll probably be reading these for a while.
...
Anyway, speaking of books and writing, it looks like I probably will not be attending one of those writer's workshops after all. But at least it's not due to my own cowardice. Apparently, I didn't even know signups had started for the workshops, and they're already all full up. Oh well. I probably would have backed out for other reasons (if you needed a laptop or something I couldn't go anyway), though a part of me did want to meet other aspiring writers in the area and perhaps set up some contacts.
TV-wise, Caprica's still going good. Only a couple weeks till new Who, and Stargate Universe is going to be back again soonish I think. Looking forward to both. Lost, though, has been a disappointment. (spoilers ahoy). The main plot on the island is okay, but I've really lost interest in the Flashsideways. I said it before, but they REALLY need to signal to the audience in some obvious way that this actually MATTERS in some way. In the Flashbacks, WHILE we watched them, we knew they mattered, because we knew this was about the characters, revealing the mysteries we didn't know. In the Flashfowards, WHILE we watched them, we knew they mattered, because they revealed where the plot on the island was leading up to. The flashsideways? WHILE we watch them, we don't know. All we know is we're seeing what life might have been like for the characters if the island sank. But we don't know it MATTERS. It could just be "oh, you like these characters? Here's some other stories involving them." It could be "We're out of ideas so we're just going to show you what might have happened in an alternate world, because the characters actions last year ripped history in two." Or it could be something like "this alternate world has real impact on what's happened or going to happen." I hope it's that. But they really need to signal it because it's hard to care when there are so many ways the story might not matter. A couple episodes of it might have been okay, but not half the season, and certainly not the whole season. If we go through a whole season and only find up what's up with the flashsideways in the finale, this season is fail, no matter how good the explanation is. They need to connect the two plots ASAP. Have Desmond or Faraday show up, babbling about alternate timelines. SOMETHING. MAKE ME CARE WHILE I'M WATCHING IT, DAMNIT. DON'T MAKE ME WONDER IF IN TWO MONTHS I SHOULD HAVE RETROACTIVELY CARED.
Sigh.
Oh, and this was on Writer's Block a while back, and liked it, so I'm posting it:
If the interior discussion in your head were indexed by category, what would the five most recurring subjects be?
1. Writing. Plot ideas mostly, but some characters, lines of dialog, etc. Mostly my own stuff, some just ideas for cracky pointless fanficy stuff that I'll never actually write down (What if Veronica Mars joined the Stargate program), but I put it all under writing. I'll put my What I'd Do With series here too, even if I haven't had one in a while.
2. Imaginary conversations. Things I either wish I had said to somebody in a past case, or what I wish I could say to somebody, or what I might say in the event somebody asked me something that they are unlikely ever to ask.
3. Not quite the same as #1, but semi-daydreaming myself in various situations... having super powers, being lost in another world, being in a zombie apocalypse, or being in the situation of another book.
4. TV/Books, what I think might happen or what I think is wrong with them now or the particular things I like about them.
5. Self-loathing
5 sometimes moves up the list depending on the time of year. So yeah, I spend a lot of time in the land of imagination.
In "things breaking" news, you know my computer? The one I bought... oh, about a year and a month ago I think. No, it's okay. But the new keyboard that came with it spazzed out and died on me. So I went back to the one I'd had about 4 years before that. I guess they really don't make them like they used to. Edit: And meanwhile, my OTHER computer's keyboard, which is even older... has spontaneously HEALED itself. Before, the home and end keys didn't work. Not a big problem, but annoying. Now they do. WTF?
And while writing this entry, I turned my head in apparently what was the wrong direction and now my neck is sore and stiff. :P. Alas.
