recent reading
Jan. 24th, 2024 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI've recently attempted two "literary" sff novels, with mixed results.
We Who Are About To, by Joanna Russ
I kept thinking of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover Landfall (which, published in 1972, pre-dates it by 5 years) as I read this; it was my first exposure to the "spaceship accidentally lands on an unknown world and colonizes it" trope. Russ's book is, you probably won't be surprised to hear, the anti-Darkover Landfall. Its protagonist is a woman who says, "fuck no, I'm not going to become a brood mare for children who will suffer to scrape a bare living in a technology-less world--I would literally rather die."
I can't say I enjoyed the book. Russ's prose is excellent and her story structure is weird but right for the story she's telling. It's just that enjoying We Who Are About To would be missing the point. It's a book about hard choices, and whether you can ever be sure that the choices you make are the right ones. It's a book about morality, fundamentally. Morality and mortality. I recommend it highly if you're in the right mental space for it.
The Two Doctors Gorski, by Isaac Fellman
This is a much more recent book, published in 2022. It makes an informative contrast to We Who Are About To; while the former is a bunch of painful questions bound together by narrative, The Two Doctors Gorski is a bunch of rather pat answers.
The protagonist, Annae, is an American just arrived in England to (she hopes) finish her doctoral work, after her studies imploded in America. She joins the lab of Dr. Marec Gorski, whose own career has been stalled for decades and who is infamously awful, but who's the only scholar who would take her on.
What she and Dr. Gorski and the book's other academics work on is magic (in Annae's case, magically removing anxiety). But magic is really a MacGuffin here; the book is fantasy with ambitions to be, as far as I can tell, a middling, liberal feminist academic novel.
The novel's theme is, I guess, "you need your "dark side"/unwanted feelings to be a whole person, and so you should forgive yourself and get therapy and do yoga." I'm not exaggerating much. The wicked or at least selfish characters in this book have academic ambitions and are interested in sex (mostly, to be fair, as a form of power); the good characters want only to help people, aren't particularly interested in sex, and go to therapy and do yoga. At the end of the book, we learn that Annae does finish her Ph.D.--but her professional focus is on teaching, with the goal of making sure her students aren't failed by the system as she was.
And . . . I mean, there's nothing wrong with that! But it's presented as the only good choice; the scholarly side of academia is the domain of abusers and psychopaths. (I was an academic. I don't recognize the version of academia in this book, although abuse certainly does happen.)
The morality of this book has no hard questions; it barely has easy ones. It's binary, black-and-white. I was particularly struck by a moment when one character proposes dealing with someone who has repeatedly caused death and other suffering due to his magic + uncontrolled anger--dealing with him in the most immediate and direct way, by killing him. Annae is horrified, and I think we're supposed to be, too. Meanwhile, the bad guy has leveled most of a town. (And shortly thereafter, the bad guy conveniently dies with no one having to do anything. It's the cheapest kind of narrative evasion.)
The Two Doctors Gorski is well-crafted on other levels, though a bit too committed to the "spare, short literary novel" aesthetic for my taste. It's got polish, which is more than I can say for a lot of things I've read lately. But at its heart, where human complexity should be, there's a sort of distilled essence of online purity culture. Ambition is bad, sex is bad, dedicating yourself 100% to the service of others is the only moral choice.
There's a gendered aspect, too, that troubles me. All the "bad" characters are men. (ETA: I should have mentioned that Annae is the ONLY woman in the book. The gender imbalance meant I kept mentally setting the story in the 1950s and then being jarred by references to Starbucks, mobile phones, and pop culture that is mysteriously the same in this world as in ours.) The two "good" characters are Annae and Ariel (a gay man, who we are specifically told is completely uninterested in sex although prone to falling unrequitedly in love; what's more, he is literally half a person, a being created to store empathy, romantic love, guilt, shame, and all the other emotions his creator found inconvenient). It raises my hackles that the implied message, for women in particular, is "Don't be ambitious. Dedicated yourself to helping others, and to self-care of course." (Again, it's not that helping others is wrong. But women always get told that!! They always get steered into low-paid, low-respected "helping" professions like social work and teaching. Even in academia itself, fields with a larger proportion of women, such as English, psychology, and biology, get less funding and are more vulnerable to adjunctification.)
I think there's a regressive strain of gender essentialism in the book, which is weeeeeird because the author, Isaac Fellman, is a trans man. I'd have expected a lot more sophistication from someone with that kind of experience. (Maybe that's not fair. Trans people can hold a whole range of views, including the essentialist, retrograde, and deeply under-analyzed. But part of the reason I wanted to read the book was because a trans man wrote it, so I am extra disappointed.)
Anyway, the whole thing made me want to read something with spaceships exploding, or a band of misfits toppling a wicked tyrant.
We Who Are About To, by Joanna Russ
I kept thinking of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover Landfall (which, published in 1972, pre-dates it by 5 years) as I read this; it was my first exposure to the "spaceship accidentally lands on an unknown world and colonizes it" trope. Russ's book is, you probably won't be surprised to hear, the anti-Darkover Landfall. Its protagonist is a woman who says, "fuck no, I'm not going to become a brood mare for children who will suffer to scrape a bare living in a technology-less world--I would literally rather die."
I can't say I enjoyed the book. Russ's prose is excellent and her story structure is weird but right for the story she's telling. It's just that enjoying We Who Are About To would be missing the point. It's a book about hard choices, and whether you can ever be sure that the choices you make are the right ones. It's a book about morality, fundamentally. Morality and mortality. I recommend it highly if you're in the right mental space for it.
The Two Doctors Gorski, by Isaac Fellman
This is a much more recent book, published in 2022. It makes an informative contrast to We Who Are About To; while the former is a bunch of painful questions bound together by narrative, The Two Doctors Gorski is a bunch of rather pat answers.
The protagonist, Annae, is an American just arrived in England to (she hopes) finish her doctoral work, after her studies imploded in America. She joins the lab of Dr. Marec Gorski, whose own career has been stalled for decades and who is infamously awful, but who's the only scholar who would take her on.
What she and Dr. Gorski and the book's other academics work on is magic (in Annae's case, magically removing anxiety). But magic is really a MacGuffin here; the book is fantasy with ambitions to be, as far as I can tell, a middling, liberal feminist academic novel.
More details, with spoilers, under the cut
. Much is made of the ways Annae has been victimized by her former academic supervisor (who initiated a sexual relationship with her, undermined her confidence, hijacked her ideas, and did his best to ruin her career when she left him). Much is also made of how Gorski is similarly abusive. Much is made of how Annae has been damaged: her constant masking of her autism leaves her hollowed out and exhausted, she blames herself for the abuse, she's isolated, unable to work, self-harming. Her refuge is reading other people's minds without their knowledge or consent. Very little is made of this (there are a few mentions that this is perhaps unethical, but they mostly come from Annae, who is presented as self-hating). The only thing Annae ever does wrong is be too hard on herself.The novel's theme is, I guess, "you need your "dark side"/unwanted feelings to be a whole person, and so you should forgive yourself and get therapy and do yoga." I'm not exaggerating much. The wicked or at least selfish characters in this book have academic ambitions and are interested in sex (mostly, to be fair, as a form of power); the good characters want only to help people, aren't particularly interested in sex, and go to therapy and do yoga. At the end of the book, we learn that Annae does finish her Ph.D.--but her professional focus is on teaching, with the goal of making sure her students aren't failed by the system as she was.
And . . . I mean, there's nothing wrong with that! But it's presented as the only good choice; the scholarly side of academia is the domain of abusers and psychopaths. (I was an academic. I don't recognize the version of academia in this book, although abuse certainly does happen.)
The morality of this book has no hard questions; it barely has easy ones. It's binary, black-and-white. I was particularly struck by a moment when one character proposes dealing with someone who has repeatedly caused death and other suffering due to his magic + uncontrolled anger--dealing with him in the most immediate and direct way, by killing him. Annae is horrified, and I think we're supposed to be, too. Meanwhile, the bad guy has leveled most of a town. (And shortly thereafter, the bad guy conveniently dies with no one having to do anything. It's the cheapest kind of narrative evasion.)
The Two Doctors Gorski is well-crafted on other levels, though a bit too committed to the "spare, short literary novel" aesthetic for my taste. It's got polish, which is more than I can say for a lot of things I've read lately. But at its heart, where human complexity should be, there's a sort of distilled essence of online purity culture. Ambition is bad, sex is bad, dedicating yourself 100% to the service of others is the only moral choice.
There's a gendered aspect, too, that troubles me. All the "bad" characters are men. (ETA: I should have mentioned that Annae is the ONLY woman in the book. The gender imbalance meant I kept mentally setting the story in the 1950s and then being jarred by references to Starbucks, mobile phones, and pop culture that is mysteriously the same in this world as in ours.) The two "good" characters are Annae and Ariel (a gay man, who we are specifically told is completely uninterested in sex although prone to falling unrequitedly in love; what's more, he is literally half a person, a being created to store empathy, romantic love, guilt, shame, and all the other emotions his creator found inconvenient). It raises my hackles that the implied message, for women in particular, is "Don't be ambitious. Dedicated yourself to helping others, and to self-care of course." (Again, it's not that helping others is wrong. But women always get told that!! They always get steered into low-paid, low-respected "helping" professions like social work and teaching. Even in academia itself, fields with a larger proportion of women, such as English, psychology, and biology, get less funding and are more vulnerable to adjunctification.)
I think there's a regressive strain of gender essentialism in the book, which is weeeeeird because the author, Isaac Fellman, is a trans man. I'd have expected a lot more sophistication from someone with that kind of experience. (Maybe that's not fair. Trans people can hold a whole range of views, including the essentialist, retrograde, and deeply under-analyzed. But part of the reason I wanted to read the book was because a trans man wrote it, so I am extra disappointed.)
Anyway, the whole thing made me want to read something with spaceships exploding, or a band of misfits toppling a wicked tyrant.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 11:28 pm (UTC)I love your description of the Russ novel as something that isn't (and should be) enjoyable!
no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 11:51 pm (UTC)That's why I grudgingly enjoy Rageprufrock's Merlin fic Drastically Defying Protocol but absolutely hate Casey McQuinston's Royal Red White and Blue. (I think the former is actually better written too, but the in-jokes are tolerable in fanfic when they really aren't in pro fic).
And all of that is BEFORE you get into SFF. Like WTF? (I read a lot of SFF and YA SFF and one of the worst things is...what is reverse anachronism? Like homophobia in the Star Trek universe kinda stuff... I know it's tough to create completely alien things, but going back 200 years and going fwd should create similar differences, right?)
no subject
Date: 2024-01-25 04:47 am (UTC)I mostly agree, though I think I'd draw some nitpicky distinctions between name-dropping references (always bad imo, and especially bad in sff for the reasons you mention), cultural context that deepens our understanding (e.g. this astronaut first wanted to be an astronaut because they grew up watching Star Trek), and Easter eggs that add a level of fun but don't distract from the narrative. I confess to loving a good Easter egg; one of K J Charles's romance novels has mentions of a character from the 1960s radio comedy Round the Horne, which I adore because it's so niche.
what is reverse anachronism? Like homophobia in the Star Trek universe kinda stuff... I know it's tough to create completely alien things, but going back 200 years and going fwd should create similar differences, right?
Do you mean things that are anachronistic/don't make sense because the story world should be significantly different from our world? It's definitely a peeve of mine. There's something closer to literal anachronism I've seen too, along the lines of "I hummed a Taylor Swift tune quietly as I went through the airlock. My love for ancient 20th century earth pop culture sure made me a big nerd!" I detest that more than anything, I think.
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Date: 2024-01-24 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-01-27 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 11:14 am (UTC)That's the book I lost the Lambda to! (It was still very fun to attend the ceremony. I miss places.)
no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 11:12 am (UTC)I was damaged in ways that are present to this day by my experience of grad school and my advisor in particular and that isn't the story I want to read or tell about academia.
I hope you found something with exploding spaceships.