50 new things in 2023, part 12/50

It's back to music for this week's new-to-me thing; I listened to Jean Redpath's 1973 album Frae My Ain Countrie. It's mostly traditional Scottish songs, with a few Burns songs and modern ones (notably "A' the Week Yer Man's Awa'," aka "The Fisherman's Wife," by Ewan MacColl) thrown in.

It's the kind of thing that you'll like if you like this kind of thing? I do, to be clear, and the album covers all the folk song bases (rejected love, lovers gone away to war, forbidden love, exile, oppression of the powerless by the powerful, and women getting stuck with an illegitimate child while the men get away scot free) in Redpath's incomparable voice. There are even a few surprises, like the rich townswoman in "Kilbogie," who, when faced with the reality of her poor suitor's highland life, hightails it back to town in a coach and six, or the rejected woman in "Farewell He," who survives her jilting via careful application of . . . common sense.

Sadly, there's nothing as mind-bogglingly weird as "The Grey Silkie" (from Redpath's eponymous 1975 album), but it's a good collection and I enjoyed it.

Wednesday reading

I haven't done one of these in a minute. I have been reading, just not posting about it.

Recently finished

All four volumes extant of Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series (The Steerswoman, The Outskirter's Secret, The Lost Steersman, and The Language of Power). These were recommended to me so long ago that I can't remember who recommended them. So long ago that they weren't available as ebooks and hard to get hold of in physical form, which is why I didn't read them sooner.

The first book in the series was published in 1989, the most recent in 2004. Supposedly there are two more on their way, but book 5 has been forthcoming at least since 2015 so I'm not holding my breath to see it any time soon. This means the story is very much unfinished.

Anyway, our main character Rowan is a Steerswoman, which means she travels around gathering information (in particular, mapping; Steerswomen are particularly engaged in finding what lies beyond their small patch of known lands). She must truthfully answer any question put to her to the best of her knowledge, and in turn, anyone she asks a question of is required to answer truthfully or be placed under the Steerswomen's ban, which means no Steerswoman will ever again answer any question the offender asks. Since Steerswomen have both a lot of useful knowledge and enormous cultural prestige, most people avoid this penalty.

Except wizards. Wizards have lots of knowledge that they refuse to share. They're constantly at war with each other and generally seem to be up to no good. The first book opens with Rowan accidentally running afoul of a wizard through what seemed like a trivial line of research, and all the subsequent books trace out her process of finding out what's going on and trying to work out how to deal with it.

There's a lot I like about these books. I like the centrality of thought and analysis, I like that Rowan is a character who isn't great with people and doesn't get a whole lot better at it, I like the moral complications that develop, and despite my frustration at its being unfinished, I very much like the slow pace of the story. There's plenty in here that doesn't particularly serve the plot, and I'm delighted about that! (Though a few things I thought were passing incidents/characters did turn back up later in more plot-relevant form.) I like Kirstein's writing style, which is plain and straightforward but manages, somehow, to be like nothing I've read before. I like the physicality of the world, and particularly the physicality of travel. Places that take days or weeks to get to, take days or weeks to get to. In some cases they take whole books. And Kirstein can do atmospheric extremely well without pushing too far into landscape description (something I have a very hard time following) or Too Many Adjectives. The long sequence in the third book when Rowan travels alone through the demon-haunted coast is a tour de force.

There's not much I don't like, but I do have to dishonorably mention that the first three books appear to take place in the World Without Queer People. There's a glancing mention of f/f sex in book 1 (so glancing that for quite a while, in the absence of any other mentions, I assumed I had misread the passage in question), but that's all. Then, in book 4, we get queerness. Sort of. Specifically, we get 2 mentions of queer sex as a possibility (both in the context of wizards, and both in the context of the sexual exploitation of vulnerable young people by wizards, so, um, not great?). We get one very elderly lesbian couple, and one man who is queer-coded, but implied to be unrequitedly in love with his best friend (who is happily married to a woman). I could just about excuse this nonsense in 1989 (just about--Melissa Scott was publishing sff with queer protagonists by then) but to have only Bad Queers, Sad Queers, and One Elderly and Thoroughly Desexualized Token Queer Couple in 2004 looks a bit gutless.

But apart from that (. . . Mrs. Lincoln), I liked the books a lot.


I also recently finished The Half Life of Valery K, the 2022 novel by Natasha Pulley (best known for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street). HLVK, whose titular character is a radiation biologist pulled out of a Soviet gulag and assigned to work on studying an irradiated ecosystem, is another book I'm ambivalent about. I read it fast, with great engagement, and enjoyed it a lot. But I still think it's kind of a mess. Pulley's fondness for mixing romance with big events works better in Watchmaker, where the events are explicitly fictional and indeed science-fictional, than it does in HLVK when the book centers around a real-world Soviet nuclear accident that occurred in 1957, killing untold people and leaving the land still polluted today. The tender, literally unspoken romance that develops between Valery and the kindly KGB officer (yes, really) who's head of site security doesn't mesh with the stakes of the story at large.

Slightly spoilery bit under the cut, not very detailed.

And in the end, when Pulley apparently writes herself into a corner and has to decide which story to conclude, she chooses the romance. In fact the ending feels tacked on anyway, too hasty and too improbable, with an almost literal deus ex machina by a character whom readers of other Cold War books will recognize.

HLVK also has these spotty moments of gender analysis that (a) I'm not sure I believe coming from this main character, and (b) don't go anywhere. Things not going anywhere happens a lot.

It's not a bad book. Like I said, I read it with a lot of enjoyment. But Natasha Pulley feels like a writer who hasn't moved on from the acclaim and success of Watchmaker. Since then she's been retreading the same ground, either with other books in the same universe or with HLVK, which feels like essentially the same kind of story, particularly the same character types, just shifted out of sff and into realistic fiction. (I think? There was a moment when I thought Pulley suggested an alternate history--there's a passage that seems to have WWII beginning in 1937 with Hitler declaring war on the Soviet Union--but then nothing came of it.)

The thing is, I think Pulley's a really skillful writer who can do better things. I want her to keep including queer men and love between queer men (though she could lose the habit of making the romances depend upon the self-sacrifice of women), but to move on to new kinds of strange, bold stories.

I should note that I haven't read her 2021 novel The Kingdoms yet; maybe that's the kind of thing I'm hoping for.


Currently reading

I haven't quite settled to anything. I started a book by Adrian Tchaikovsky but it opened with a big battle scene that I wasn't in the mood for. What I am in the mood for is a good mystery novel, but my taste in mysteries is very particular. I wish Reginald Hill could have lived to be about 110 and kept on happily producing good novels 'til the end.


Reading next

See above. At some point I do want to read Pulley's The Kingdoms, but I want to give it a bit more time so I come to it less influenced by Valery K.