jack

I can't figure out why I'm more annoyed with the Percy Jackson characters not figuring out who "Perseus Jackson"'s father is, but not with the Harry Potter characters for not figuring out that the werewolf was "Wolfy McWolface"

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I finally read the new novel by Shamus Young (who did the DM of the Rings screencap webcomic).

The previous one was the Witch Watch, a 19th century adventure when the protagonist an introspective unfilfilled soldier is killed in a scuffle and is resurrected by mistake by minions of a necromancer.

This one is a cyberpunk mystery reminiscent of Caves of Steel.

The Good

The setting is great. A fictional tropical city, exploited by colonial-ish powers not by direct conquest per se, but by economic leverage, now a densely populated but not the most technologically advanced world city. Increasing penetration of robots into the workforce, not completely realistically, but from a very 2020 perspective not a 1950 one.

An introspective, meticulous but idiosyncratic crook, specialising in rewarding low-violence crimes sucked into a robot who-dunnit mystery, while being pursued by various mobsters and corrupt police. A very sympathetic robot character with a lot to say about how it feels to be built around a drive to serve humans and to protect humans.

A lot of delving into the philosophy of being a robot, how robots learn, how they have drives, the practicalities of what robots are manufactured, which brains are duplicated, etc, etc.

A lot of goon-banter, a minor genre of scene where the protagonist and the goons chat while waiting for the boss.

The Niggles

Two things niggled at me, both hard to describe. The first is going to be a bit difficult to try to talk about. Shamus Young is probably neurodivergent of some sort: he's talked about not being officially diagnosed, but seeming different to most people. It doesn't come up much, but in his memoir blog posts (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=12687) he talks a lot about how other people just seem weird to him.

It's especially weird for me because a lot of the things he says really resonate with me, but I don't think I'm coming from the same place. My theory is that the "understanding people" bit of my brain is ok, but the "if you failed once you probably learned something and it's worth trying again, not hiding from it forever" bit of my brain was really wonky for some reason, but that's obviously just a metaphor I use somehow, I can't really see what's going on in my head.

The protagonist of Another Kind of Life isn't definitively neurodiverse, but enough things about his experience make me read him as someone who finds people weird but has learned how to interact well with them (possibly as Shamus is, I don't know). But what I'm about to talk about seems to apply to almost all the characters in both books.

But anyway, a few things in both books really jump out into my notice when I don't know if other people would notice them in the same way. Something like, characters having a running narrative in their head of why someone else is reacting a certain way, when I would really, really have expected that to be sufficiently common for soldiers or crooks (or just most people) that the character would be used to it, either just subconsciously interpreting the behaviour, or annoyed that people KEEP doing that even though it makes no sense, but not "oh, he's obviously doing this because he thinks that" when it's something I'd expect to happen all the time. But I don't know if my expectation is more right than his is, maybe people do have mental narratives like that and it just sticks out to me more.

The other thing is also hard to describe, the book had the sort of arc of solving the murder and other professional and personal problems of protagonist that I'd expect, but somehow it didn't feel satisfying and tense the way I felt it should. I can't say what's wrong, but it felt like he just worked through everything and worked it all out, even though he definitely did run into a lot of sticky situations along the way. So I was left with a feeling of "that was nice, but it felt like it was lacking something, but I can't really point to what" which is annoying to try to describe (sorry), despite really liking most of the book.

For the first time for, um, a very very long time I returned to a book I was interested in but didn't finish the first time.

And oh boy. This book is so *interesting*. The gender stuff, the prisoner stuff, the family-structure stuff, the political-group stuff, the utopian other worlds projects, the policing, the transport system. Even before mentioning the miracles-exist-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-that stuff. Almost everything that happened and everything about how the world was sparked another tangent of introspection.

But almost all of them also aggravated me into fits of ranting about them as well.

Being that interesting is clearly a good thing, I think it deserved the attention it got. But I am still aggravated about the things I'm upset about, some of which I think are a real problem with the book, others of which I think are moments of weakness that are not a big deal in theory but really rubbed me up the wrong way.

Having a protagonist who's a terrible person, on the plus side, gives my brain a good workout: you can't just accept what happens, you always have to be considering "is this accurate" and "is this ethical"? But on the bad side is unpleasant to read about and makes it a lot harder to understand aspects of the book you can't trust his description of.

It reminds me of Humbert Humbert from Lolita or Rick from Rick and Morty: it's interesting to understand someone who's a terrible person, but you bear responsibility for the fact that however horrible, readers may sympathise with them and treat them as role models :(

The prison system

There's this idea of convicts guilty of serious offences "serving time" by serving society. Indeed, wandering around in public, forbidden from holding jobs or possessions, surviving on charity, but doing odd jobs (or weirdly important jobs) for people.

The book is clearly not saying this is OK, it raises it as a thought provoking way of dealing with serious crime, but shows how dystopian it can be, so it's hard for me to say that it *shouldn't* have been part of the book.

But as I've grown up, I've got increasingly less patience with clever philosophical experiments about society. I've always *loved* thought experiments of all sorts, I think they often do serve very well to show what we think is important in various circumstances. But I also think, they often gloss over how much of ACTUAL real life problems are problems that depend on the specifics and logistics of the real world problems, and one clever abstract decision does almost nothing to actually help resolve them.

Like, I don't want *every* book to be a morality tale about the problems of contemporary society. That's a good thing, but it's not the *only* good thing. But if you wrote a book about how criminals are stripped of their civil rights and forced to work as slaves... you didn't think to compare that to the way that happens right now AT ALL?

That's a kind of striking omission, isn't it?

Or maybe it's me that's missing the point. Maybe it IS intended as a "this is wrong" polemic.

But if so, it seems strange that it omits the LARGEST question about the situation which the real-life parallel immediately raises. You've described the fate of criminals who (a) have committed crimes sufficiently horrible, mostly murder, that their sentence effectively lasts the rest of their life but (b) are sufficiently harmless they can wander around society without being significantly guarded.

Surely that's a TINY MINORITY of people who commit crimes. So what about everyone else? Are these the ONLY sorts of criminal in this society? If so, how come? Is everyone else humanely rehabilitated? Or not driven to crime because there's a universal good education system and minimum income? Or incarcerated somewhere unmentioned? Or what?

Like, if you took our society, and premeditated murderers were treated worse, but all other crimes everyone just never committed in the first place... that doesn't make it ok, but it probably means life is overwhelmingly better for almost everyone. Shouldn't that have been more prominently mentioned in this system? Or is the system just as bad as our one, but especially bad murderers have special less-humane punishments? That's what America does, and it's awful, but I think those disproportionate punishments don't exist in isolation, they're a part of how the system is inhumane to almost everyone subjected to it.

Was all this deliberately left out?

Or does just "throwing interesting ideas at the wall" lead to this sort of hole where you don't have room to follow through all the implications?

Apparently we have a normal-ish police force? And people committing casual street thuggery are almost inevitably caught immediately? But do it anyway? What?

Gender stuff

Similar questions arise with the gender stuff. The book postulates, as far as I can tell, a society where people are referred to with gender neutral words and pronouns, but people still have some similar tendencies and prejudices in what's likely to be true about people who would be AMAB or AFAB in our society.

This is massively obscured by the protagonist who observes that people are potentially being hypocritical about this, and responds by being incredibly gender-essentialist and judgemental about everything.

This did raise several interesting questions in my mind and as I struggled to put into words his attitude. Eventually I settled on, he has an unexamined belief/assumption that people divide into two boxes, one labelled male, one labelled female, that accord with various personality traits and body types. Which makes *no sense* because it's *not* how the world works, but obviously, he proceeds as if he's correct. For instance, he assigns people pronouns according to how he sees their personality, even though often finding an excuse to mention that he thinks they look like they have a different biological sex. But the fact that he has to do this all the fucking time doesn't clue him in to the idea that maybe his dichotomy doesn't actually work like that.

So, although that was *unpleasant*, it was also certainly *interesting*.

I think (?) that this is deliberately intended to show a society which has weird taboos which are a bit different to ours, to throw light on both our taboos, and the underlying concepts of gender.

But what it says that that's the society they ended up with seems to have a lot of unpleasant implications. Like, they've spent hundreds of years avoiding *saying* there are two binary genders, even if people think that. But my current best guess is that some people strongly identify with a gender and some people don't. If everyone is "they" I would expect a lot of people who today let themselves get sorted into a box corresponding to the sex people see them as, instead thinking of themselves as the equivalent of non-binary. And we *definitely* have plenty of people who don't fit into one of two binary categories personality-wise, even the protagonist admits as much.

But we don't seem to have a society where 40% of people don't really identify with a binary gender. The protagonist makes a big deal about not knowing the right binary box for *one* character. And how the more tabloid-ish sort of newspaper makes a big deal about wanting to know that celebrity's biological sex. That suggests he thinks he can tell in all *other* cases. If everyone dresses gender neutral and lots of people don't choose to grow breasts, I don't think that would be true. I mean, even if he doesn't AGREE, surely he would notice that in order to denounce it?

So where does that leave us? Is this deliberate? Are we supposed to assume the protagonist is lying to himself about this and actually there IS a big nonbinary majority and the protagonist just hides it from us? That would be consistent with the plot, but... if there's no indication that happens, if the book builds up no trust with the reader that the real situation reflects something different to what's shown, are we supposed to know that? Or is it disagreeing, is it saying that most societies DO stream people into binary identities, and that even after hundreds of years of avoiding that we will inevitably still have them just as strongly?

This isn't especially personal to me but I could barely read the book because of it, and writing a book partly about nonbinary gender politics without thinking about whether it would be hurtful to actual real life trans people seems like a really bad idea. But OTOH, I know trans people who had the opposite reaction, that they disliked reading "everything will be fine" futures and almost preferred reading about societies which were fucked up in different ways.

And the economics

So, everyone works a 20 hour week at most, with the exception of people with a strong vocation? We think? Although we only really deal with political leaders and senior scientists and engineers, and prisoners, we don't see anyone in a typical economic situation.

I gather that's supposed to be an actual 20 hour week, not a zero-hour-contract-you-can-barely-live-but-the-economic-figures-look-good week?

But also, everyone is really worried about their rents going up? And land/building ownership is concentrated in one particular political group?

How do these things go together? How many people are living in politics? Many? Few?

As I commented about the prison system, we have a lot of interesting concepts, but seem to miss the most important questions. We have a lot of worry about economics. But like, do most people have enough to eat and shelter and so on? Or not? If so, the system is working *quite well*, even with all the bad things going on. Or is this theoretical utopian work life actually only apply to a small proportion of people and most people, especially people who are discriminated against, get utterly screwed but aren't "counted" when estimating how much people need to work? I can't tell.

Sometimes not telling us stuff is interesting, letting us ponder the question, but when too many important things are left out, it undermines our connection to the world and characters.

Azul

Liv knew she wanted this game for ages, and I wasn't sure but immediately fell in love with it. It's based on Portuguese Islamic-derived ceramic tilings. All the parts are absolutely gorgeous, the tiles are fairly simple design on simple plastic, but they feel sooo tactile and are sooo beautiful.

The gameplay is collecting tiles to fill out a grid, and blocking the opponent from doing so, but the rules are really quite simple, and the strategy really quite complicated.

Trail of Lightning

By an urban fantasy by Rebecca Roanhorse, who won the Campbell Award and Best Short Story Hugo this year. Set after global warming causes catastrophic ocean rises and political cohesion in America dissolves, in the newly evolving and ironically-drought-ridden Diné nation from what had been the Diné (Navajo) reservation.

The protagonist is a monster hunter. It's interesting to read a story with some of the immortal figures like Coyote who've shown up in other fantasy novels I've read, but by an author who presumably knows the original stories better.

City of Brass

By S. A. Chakraboty. An early 19th century Egyptian con-woman discovers she has Djinn heritage and is immediately sucked into complicated multi-sided supernatural politics between factions of Djinn, and other more powerful immortals, and not-exactly-Djinn, etc.

If, like me, you like supernatural politics, history of Djinn through Islamic dominance, to before to their capture by Solomon, all the way back to the early world, this might be the book you've been waiting for.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the real-world cultures depicted and drawn from, but it felt very much like characters actually being there, a wide variety of people.

Oh gosh, this book is hard to describe. It started as a web serial, and was eventually published. By David Wong, who, if I got this right, is executive editor at Cracked.com. David Wong is a pen name he adopted for his online writing, and also wrote into these stories as the main character.

It's a riotous embracing of style over coherency. The main character and his friend, John, are two flaky drop-outs who've stumbled into a position as trouble-shooters of various sorts of occult problems.

I hear the film adaption stops there, with a "random slackers save the world" plot, with them blundering from one crisis to another endlessly well-meaning but endlessly screwed up.

The book does more although it's hard to describe what. The underlying reality isn't especially more coherent, there's various sorts of occult happenings that don't seem completely consistent with each other. But there's a lot more going on with the characters. As someone points out, you start by pegging David as the responsible one and John as the screw up. But in fact, David is better at holding a job, but John is better in almost every other way, nicer to people, better to his friends, less bitter, etc.

It's often funny. It's occasionally terrifying.

For a book called "John dies at the end", it kept me guessing all the way through whether, well, John would die at the end, which is a pretty impressive achievement.

I'd lost track, apparently I did read his unrelated novel Futuristic Violence and Men in Fancy Suits before, which likewise had a so-so plot but really great characters and intermittent but great humour.

I'm so used to reading about the ways beta colony is utopian, I've often not stopped to add up the ways it isn't.

People elsewhere in the galaxy talk about it as one of the most progressive places -- certainly in comparison to Barrayar.

Many of the downsides are -- as you might expect -- in increased conformity, like how in Sweden sex equality is overall better, but there's a big public database of everyone's salary.

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Now I've had an ereader for a while, what are my impressions?

Mostly very positive. I think the biggest thing I enjoy is being able to buy more books easily, both without having to wait, and without worrying about whether they'll become clutter.

I was pretty good before, in fact -- I'd buy two to three books I was interested in, and then read them, and try to keep the number of "I feel like I ought to read this but actually I'm not excited to for some reason" to a minimum, and put books I didn't want in the charity shop pile, and accumulated new bookshelf books fairly slowly. But it's that much easier when I don't have to worry about it.

I haven't tracked exactly what the prices have been like. Usually somewhat less than a new new book, but more than buying it second hand. I used to *like* buying second hand, I liked having a book that felt it was part of a community, that had tried several people before finally finding a home, and had a story behind that particular edition. And I still feel odd paying *more* for an ebook. But the convenience is very very nice.

I also like that it's small and light. I can curl up reading without worrying at being at a good angle to rest the book somewhere. Or lie on my back if I like. And if I'm going somewhere I may want to read, I can bring it along, whether for an hour or so, or for a week or so, and not need to worry, am I bringing too much weight. Nor, do I have enough books -- I can easily load up and have enough for ages (or buy more from my ereader or from my phone if there's wifi or 4G even briefly).

It makes holidays and hospital waiting rooms so much easier. I don't need to plan ahead much, I can just have reading material if I want it, and not feel it's wasted if I don't need it.

And if I don't have my ereader I can usually get the same book on my phone to read there if I need to, even if it isn't perfectly convenient.

I got the backlight version, which means I can read in dim light easily, but either way, it doesn't send my eyes woogly the way too much reading from a phone or computer screen does.

The only things I don't like are the extra things about books. It feels companionable when Liv and I can see what each other are reading and be interested in it, without needing to always ask. And for now I still have a bookshelf of all the books I previously bought physically, but as more of the books I've read are ebooks, I start to lose that "visitors can look over my bookshelf" thing.

I wonder if there's any way of making a replacement for the discoverability, something like empty cd cases with titles on, or an electronic display that cycles through cover images?

And it's also a shame it means you can't easily lend or borrow books -- I love being able to introduce someone to a book, or borrow something interesting, even if I could afford to buy it myself.

And in particular, I hadn't expected this to be a thing, but when I read a physical book, I often remember *that specific copy*, fondly remembering where I first acquired it, where I was when I first read it, who I told about it, which edition it was, etc, etc. And that's really nice, but I don't get it the same with an ebook.

Initiation, Chris Babu

YA dystopia, the protagonists live in the crappy zone of "New America", an enclave comprising New York, after everywhere fell to some pandemic and other things. And there's an "an initiation", where they can volunteer to attempt, which can promote them to one of the other zones. Which turns out to involve passing along the old subway from the crappy zone to the best zone, and at each station facing some sort of mental or physical challenge.

The fact they have this system seems contrived (as does a lot of other stuff), but the process of the protagonists getting past it is really tense! The challenges work very well, the puzzles are sometimes ones I'm familiar with, but sometimes not. The physical challenges were pretty scary, which I rarely say! Just close enough to something I could theoretically do to be terrifying, when more extreme things common in fiction are just quite abstract to me.

The friends and family stuff early on was good too.

I still think this system makes NO SENSE. They address it several times, but it still doesn't seem convincing that they *have* this test no-one's intended to pass. It's not surprising it exists (e.g. see the horrible "intelligence tests" that are impossible but look superficially plausible used to deny people rights in various places), but everyone is already segregated by zone, no-one would find it *more* unfair if they just didn't have it.

Artemis, by Andy Weir

A pretty good yarn, I loved seeing his vision for what a Moon city would look like. But I wasn't convinced all the worldbulding made sense, or that he'd done the best job he could writing a female character.

Provenance, Ann Leckie

More aliens! I'm really glad, I wanted more aliens. And a view from outside the Radsch. Everything else was very well done, although I didn't love it as much as I loved the protagonist of the previous trilogy.

Clocktaur book 2, Ursula Vernon

Only half way through, but, you know, about as good as the first one :)

Wow, I haven't had much time for reading for a while, but I've gone through quite a lot recently.

I missed when Yoon Ha Lee's Raven Stratagem actually came out, but I read it and really enjoyed it, I still found it quite confusing to come to a clear opinion on anything, but I felt like I had a much clearer picture than after the first novel. I also read at least one of the short stories and want to binge all of them at some point. If you liked Ninefox Gambit, it's a very worthy sequel.

I also read Wrong Stars (Tim Pratt). I'd previous read his urban fantasy, which I enjoyed but didn't stick with. It's an interesting universe, with humanity colonising much of the solar system and a number of other worlds, and one alien race known, the Liars, who have been a source of some more advanced technology, but distressingly uncommunicative about the history of the galaxy. And the protagonists stumble onto previously-unknown alien tech that leads to a mad scramble of finding stuff out.

I've read several examples of sociopathic characters in several different books, and been left with a bunch of thoughts.

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