Overly Invested Outsiders Wednesday
Feb. 3rd, 2016 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
"Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars -- the other kinds of men, the other lives?"
The Left Hand of Darkness was even better than I expected. I don't know if I'm completely ready to talk about it yet -- I might make another post next week or a month from now, or I might just answer questions if you have any, but I loved it. It's very carefully built as a story about an alien envoy learning a new world, and built so that you become accustomed to the Gethenians slowly and incompletely, the way Genly Ai does, and there's an emotional undertow that creeps up on you so that you barely notice it until you're half drowned.
By "you" I mean "me," of course -- me and Ai.
I'm trying to think of a way to call this a "mature" or "literary" take on space diplomacy without being a jerk about it, because the things I'm comparing it to are also things I love. I keep wanting to say that it's George Eliot to Star Trek's Dickens: clear-eyed and grounded, I mean, and patient with its premise to a degree that Star Trek never manages. It's tough (I want to say "realistic," but who knows?) about the enormously complicated prospect of meeting anyone for the first time, let alone in space, even with the Trek-like cheat of common ancestry -- but it's also essentially hopeful. I was glad for that: Alien was a great movie, but I don't want all my first-contact stories to be Alien. Or most of them, even.
What I'm Reading Now
So I found this Georgette Heyer book at my mother-in-law's house (it's one of the books she bought as part of a Romance Novel Paperback Club in the early 2000s, most of which have titles like Fake ID Bride and The Billionaire's Secret Baby) and people keep telling me to read Georgette Heyer, so I took it home. It's called The Grand Sophy. The opening is not immediately arresting: a couple of middle-aged drawing-room types throw themselves an exposition party, in a plummy style similar to the one I associate with impending murder.
Sophy is a cousin of the exposition family, whom they have agreed to host while her father is away in South America. She is a blinding ray of human sunshine in lavishly described clothes, with unlimited funds and a little coterie of pets. From the minute she shows up, she's sort of exuberantly fictional, like an imaginative twelve-year-old in a playground that looks like the past. Sophy has noticed some dissatisfactions in the personal lives of her relatives and plans to fix them all up, Flora Poste-style, after waving away a bunch of perfectly sensible objections. It's a lot of fun, for the most part. I don't like how much humiliation is getting piled on the head of the one cousin's Excessively Serious Fiancee. She's a little pedantic and gossipy, sure, but her concern for propriety only seems excessive because she doesn't realize she's living in a frothy twentieth-century comedy-romance.
The Laughing Monsters is not really my thing at all, but so far it's been a little better than the first few pages led me to expect. How much better remains to be seen. There's a guy who's been hired to spy on another guy in a city with unreliable electricity, no one is likable because no one's supposed to be, the streets are in bad shape and everyone is cagey about their intentions.
And I took both Under the Volcano and The Victim out from the library, because I was feeling optimistic. What I can say about Under the Volcano so far: it's got great weather and good drunkenness. Otherwise, I'm reserving judgment. I haven't read very far.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Victim, whatever's next on my bookshelf, assorted Victorians for tutoring. Work is going to be taking over my reading life for the next three weeks, so these posts might get sparse, or they might not, depending on how badly I manage my time.
What I've Finished Reading
"Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars -- the other kinds of men, the other lives?"
The Left Hand of Darkness was even better than I expected. I don't know if I'm completely ready to talk about it yet -- I might make another post next week or a month from now, or I might just answer questions if you have any, but I loved it. It's very carefully built as a story about an alien envoy learning a new world, and built so that you become accustomed to the Gethenians slowly and incompletely, the way Genly Ai does, and there's an emotional undertow that creeps up on you so that you barely notice it until you're half drowned.
By "you" I mean "me," of course -- me and Ai.
I'm trying to think of a way to call this a "mature" or "literary" take on space diplomacy without being a jerk about it, because the things I'm comparing it to are also things I love. I keep wanting to say that it's George Eliot to Star Trek's Dickens: clear-eyed and grounded, I mean, and patient with its premise to a degree that Star Trek never manages. It's tough (I want to say "realistic," but who knows?) about the enormously complicated prospect of meeting anyone for the first time, let alone in space, even with the Trek-like cheat of common ancestry -- but it's also essentially hopeful. I was glad for that: Alien was a great movie, but I don't want all my first-contact stories to be Alien. Or most of them, even.
What I'm Reading Now
So I found this Georgette Heyer book at my mother-in-law's house (it's one of the books she bought as part of a Romance Novel Paperback Club in the early 2000s, most of which have titles like Fake ID Bride and The Billionaire's Secret Baby) and people keep telling me to read Georgette Heyer, so I took it home. It's called The Grand Sophy. The opening is not immediately arresting: a couple of middle-aged drawing-room types throw themselves an exposition party, in a plummy style similar to the one I associate with impending murder.
Sophy is a cousin of the exposition family, whom they have agreed to host while her father is away in South America. She is a blinding ray of human sunshine in lavishly described clothes, with unlimited funds and a little coterie of pets. From the minute she shows up, she's sort of exuberantly fictional, like an imaginative twelve-year-old in a playground that looks like the past. Sophy has noticed some dissatisfactions in the personal lives of her relatives and plans to fix them all up, Flora Poste-style, after waving away a bunch of perfectly sensible objections. It's a lot of fun, for the most part. I don't like how much humiliation is getting piled on the head of the one cousin's Excessively Serious Fiancee. She's a little pedantic and gossipy, sure, but her concern for propriety only seems excessive because she doesn't realize she's living in a frothy twentieth-century comedy-romance.
The Laughing Monsters is not really my thing at all, but so far it's been a little better than the first few pages led me to expect. How much better remains to be seen. There's a guy who's been hired to spy on another guy in a city with unreliable electricity, no one is likable because no one's supposed to be, the streets are in bad shape and everyone is cagey about their intentions.
And I took both Under the Volcano and The Victim out from the library, because I was feeling optimistic. What I can say about Under the Volcano so far: it's got great weather and good drunkenness. Otherwise, I'm reserving judgment. I haven't read very far.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Victim, whatever's next on my bookshelf, assorted Victorians for tutoring. Work is going to be taking over my reading life for the next three weeks, so these posts might get sparse, or they might not, depending on how badly I manage my time.
