something queer going on

I got my MRI results back, and as far as I can tell from googling all the medical terms (and the fact that I haven't gotten a call from my healthcare provider saying to come in immediately) I don't have cancer. I'm relieved, obviously, or at least as relieved as I can be when nobody has actually said, "Hey, you're fine." It's not fine, but it's not life-threatening or urgent.

More on the not-fine-ness under the cut. Includes reproductive anatomy, but nothing TMI, I think. ( Click here for more. )

So, in non-medical good news, the city moved my bus stop back to where it used to be, hooray! I was expecting the construction to go on all summer at least. It saves me close to ten minutes' walking each way, which doesn't sound like much, but which a lot of days was definitely TOO MUCH. (Partly because the route to the original bus stop mostly skirts the riverside park, which is pretty pleasant and only requires crossing a couple of streets. The route to the replacement stop ran along one of the town's main roads, with many street crossings and many drivers who neither look nor slow down before they turn. I almost got hit multiple times in just a couple of months.)

Between these two developments, I no longer feel quite so much like the last straw is incoming.


I've been reading a bit. Seeing the trailer for the Murderbot TV show made me decide to try the books again--previously I read the first two and lost interest. I still think the first book is by far the strongest, while the later ones get repetitive and wish-fulfillment-y. But I enjoyed them well enough and I'm looking forward to watching the show.

Most recently I read Freya Marske's romantasy Sword Crossed, and liked everything about it, in a popcorn sort of way, except the central romance, which irritated me intensely. But the worldbuilding is fun, and I like that it's a fantasy focused on trade and economics rather than swords and dragons.


New series of Taskmaster begins soon! Normally I would hate the idea of an American guest, but Jason Mantzoukas is so weird that I think he'll be great.


And finally: if you had asked me ten years ago who would turn out to be a better LGBTQ ally, J K Rowling or Robert de Niro, I would certainly have guessed wrong.


ETA: And my hearing seems to have recovered from the MRI. It took a couple of days, though.

1) I am legally in possession of a new name!

The process was more awkward than it should have been, because I foolishly relied on information from a co-worker who had just changed his name, rather than calling the court to check. Co-worker told me that (a) all the hearings are over Google Meet only, and when I checked the form I was sent, it did say in small print on the bottom "All hearings are on Google Meet," and (b) the judge wouldn't ask me any detailed reasons for the change, and "personal reasons" was sufficient, which was also what the clerk told me when I was filling out the form.

I'm sure nobody deliberately misled me (my guess is that my co-worker saw a different judge with different procedures), but neither thing turned out to be quite true.

( Click for more )

2) Not much else is going on. My life is dull, apart from looking at the news in ever-mounting horror.

I want to stop getting my news from Twitter, in part because I'm in the process of leaving Twitter altogether. I'd like to support actual journalism by subscribing to an actual newspaper, but my god, the options are grim. ( Click for more )

3) I'm not even reading much. I buy a zillion books (on sale, on Kindle, yes I know), but the general state of everything everywhere is making me hugely risk-averse when I can be. So I re-read, or look at YouTube videos of Dylan Hollis baking or the chocolate guy making fully-functional superconducting supercolliders filled with raspberry ganache, or I watch low-stakes British comedy panel shows.

However, I am reading one thing I've never read before: The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's translation. Recently Twitter had another round of ignorant right-wing douchebros giving her shit about how bad and woke her translations of Homer are, so I bought one.

( Click for more )

3) A bit late to mention this, but I wrote a thing for Yuletide.

Puppets (2312 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Astreiant Series - Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Philip Eslingen/Nicolas Rathe
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding
Summary: It's only an old story.


This is a story idea I may revisit at some point; there are things I'd like to explore about Astreiant's matriarchy without having a deadline at the most exhausting time of the year for me, and also not needing to keep the result suitable for gift-giving. (Basically: what if Astreiant had a men's rights movement? But even in the very different context of an actual matriarchy where men actually do have fewer rights than women, I realize that "men's rights movement" is not a phrase to necessarily spark joy.)

I don't know if it's perverse of me to want to focus on that (maybe? I tend to have the urge to pick a canon up and shake it). And I don't think Scott presents Astreiant as a utopia at all; I do however think some fans see it as one. Which requires a certain effort of will--while men in Astreiant have a lot more rights than European women did at the period the Points series is based on, the inequalities are still clear. (To be fair to utopian readers, though, the canon of the Points books is shall we say variable, so some picking and choosing is inevitable.)

If I ever actually wrote all the fics I intend to write someday . . . I'd have a lot more fics.

So, I turned 55 on Monday. Like all multiple-of-5 birthdays, this one is inspiring thought. Aging, mortality, all of that extremely fun stuff. And I can no longer set it aside with "someday." Someday is now, or in the next few years, at least. (I do not have a family history of people living long lives in good health. Maybe I'll be different. Maybe not.)

It's interesting how much "What do I want the rest of my life to look like?" is a different question at 55 than even at 45. And how very much I don't feel any closer to an answer.


Anyway, I took a 4-day weekend for my birthday, which has been nice although far from long enough. I haven't done much--that was kind of the goal--but I did see an actual movie in the actual cinema for the first time since before Covid started. (It was Deadpool and Wolverine, which was slightly better than it deserved to be. I'm the wrong kind of nerd to be the ideal audience for it, and I'm pretty over the whole "mass-produced corporate entertainment product ironically poking fun at mass-produced corporate entertainment products" thing, but I still mostly enjoyed it.)

Other activities:

Reading: I'm still having trouble finding anything I really like. I keep shying away from books that are obviously going to be serious or challenging, and then resenting the books I read because they're unserious and unchallenging. ( More under the cut. )

Listening: Modes of Thought In Anterran Literature, by Wolf at the Door studios (with Alex Kemp as writer, showrunner, and main performer, though you have to dig deep to find cast information), which I saw recommended on Twitter. This is an audio drama consisting largely of lectures for a Classics course of the same title at Harbridge University. Anterra is an ancient civilization, dating back to approx 78,000 BCE (and no, there's not an extra zero in there), whose ruins were discovered on the seafloor after a Chinese submarine accident seven years ago.

I've listened to all the aired episodes--about 30--and I still don't know if I like it. The stuff that's actually about Anterra is interesting, and I really like the idea of an audio drama structured as a class, but the focus has increasingly shifted over towards X-Files style conspiracy stuff that doesn't interest me as much. Plus, the academic angle is just plausible enough, with a lot of actual real-world archaeological references, that my skepticism engages, and I want to know things like how the Anterran language (an unknown language, much too old to be closely related to any known ancient language, in an unknown and apparently logographic script) could possibly have been deciphered at all, let alone so quickly. And why this seemingly undergraduate introductory class has so many graduate students in it. And why the lecture topics are so random.

Randomness is the main problem, really. The show seems to be winging it, without a clear direction or a planned endpoint. Plot elements get dropped in and forgotten while new ones take over. At this point, new episodes aren't even being numbered, so I have no idea how close we are to the end, or if there is a planned ending, or what.

At the same time, I don't not recommend it? It's trying something pretty unusual, and I can respect that. It might be worth trying a few episodes to see what you think.


Watching: Nothing at the moment. But a new season of Taskmaster UK is starting in a couple of weeks!

After another long silence for no good reason--mostly the feeling that nothing in my life is important enough to post about--I at last have Significant News.

To wit, I have COVID. For the first time, as far as I know.

So far it's been very mild, just tiredness, an annoying dry cough, mild intermittent sore throat, mild temperature elevation that technically doesn't quality as a fever (although it should, because my normal temperature is only about 97.5 F and I've been running about 2 degrees higher), and some tightness in the chest. I'm keeping an eye on it, of course. I have a pulse oximeter that I bought back in 2020/2021; I'll dig that out and check occasionally.

Interestingly, my symptoms started on Wednesday morning, but I got negative COVID tests on Wednesday and Thursday, and my first positive test was today. It was very, very positive though: a big bold line appeared within about 8 minutes of applying the sample.

So I'm off work until next Thursday, probably; if I continue to feel decent-ish it might be almost enjoyable.

I am, however, pissed off that after over 4 years of avoiding crowds and masking (almost) all the time indoors in public, a moment of truly pathetic weakness led to COVID.

I can't be sure, of course, but my best guess is this: Tuesday of last week, after a doctor's appointment, I wanted to go to Starbucks. I don't regularly go to Starbucks, but I had the craving. And it was a hot day, and this Starbucks had no outdoor seating that was in the shade. So I sat inside, and didn't put my mask back on between drinks because I felt silly. I was there for maybe 45 minutes tops, and wasn't sitting close to anyone. But that seems to have been enough to get whammied.

Apparently there's a new variant again and a new surge? I am an object lesson in why we should keep masking, or mask up again.


So, I'll have some time on my hands for the next week. Can anyone recommend me things? I'm more likely to get to books and podcasts than anything visual, but all recs are welcome. Preferably fairly lighthearted, preferably queer.


Here are some things I've been enjoying lately:

1) The novels of A. J. Demas. These are mostly male/male romance, set in a world based on ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia. They're fun, and there's plot beyond the romance. Some of them are a bit Tumblr-y for my taste, and unfortunately the last novel, The House of the Red Balconies, which was on track to be my favorite, ends very suddenly about 100 pages too soon. However I can recommend Honey and Pepper, and One Night in Boukos (which has two romances, one m/m and one m/f).

The author's notes link you to her other novels, written under the name (possibly her wallet name?) Alice Degan. I read one of them, From all False Doctrine. It was well-written and I enjoyed it in many ways, but it was very, very, very, very Christian. I think the Degan novels were written before the Demas books, and you can definitely see traces of a Christian worldview (specifically Christian sexual ethics) in the early Demas books. There's a lot less of it in the most recent ones.


2) The Old Bridge Inn series, by Annick Trent. Historical queer romance set in 1790s England. There are 4 books: 2 m/m novels, 1 f/f novel, and 1 f/f novella (more a short story imo). They can be read in any order, so I'd recommend trying the best two, The Oak and the Ash (m/m) and Sixpenny Octavo (f/f). These books are deeply, impressively embedded in history, and the central characters are all workers and artisans rather than rich people. The connecting thread is a "reading club" run out of the titular Old Bridge Inn, which meets for reading aloud and to which people can subscribe for a small fee and borrow books. But in the anti-revolutionary panic of 1790s England, the club is only dubiously legal even when it stays out of politics. And not everyone in it is staying out of politics.


3) Various by T. Kingfisher. I thought all of her Kingfisher books were adult books, and that the children's stuff was all published as Ursula Vernon. Turns out that's not true, but I enjoyed both of the kids' books I accidentally bought (Illuminations and Minor Mage). And I really liked Thorn Hedge, which is an adult book (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty) although sadly quite short.


4) World Gone Wrong, by Audacious Machine Creative. This is an audio drama in the form of a chat podcast that discusses the various happenings of what seems to be the ongoing end of the world. More light-hearted than it sounds, with hints that the characters are as deeply traumatized as you'd expect but are trying not to think about it. This is of course riffing off of the Covid pandemic in various ways, so a lot of the jokes are in the "it's funny because it's painfully true" category. But there's also pure silliness: the first episode tackles the question of what to do if your Pekingese dog becomes a werewolf. I've only listened to the first couple of episodes but I like it a lot so far.


5) G.O.B.L.I.N.S, a very new scripted audio drama by most of the people who made Stellar Firma at Rusty Quill. (This is not associated with Rusty Quill, just to be clear.) Features Tim Meredith, Ben Meredith, Imogen Harris, Jenny Haufek, and Amy Dickinson.

The premise is that a woman who works in planning for local government accidentally stumbles through the Veil and into a world of goblins, elves, fairies, the fae, and other such beings. Specifically, she finds herself in their equivalent of a local government planning office. Since she's stuck there until the next time the Veil thins, they offer her a job.

The show is crowdfunding right now, so there's only the pilot episode. But the pilot is very good indeed: funny, engaging, with a whole lot of worldbuilding and characterization threaded, apparently effortlessly, throughout. The pilot only seems to be available on acast, although the show itself will eventually be obtainable from all the usual suspects. You can listen here.

And if you like it, and can spare some money towards helping its staff get paid, the crowdfunder is here.


6) Speaking of Rusty Quill, I keep bouncing off of The Magnus Protocol. Not for any fault of writing or acting, but because the sound design makes portions of it incomprehensible to me. Any scenes set in the staff breakroom or outdoors have background noise, echoes, lower dialogue volume, etc. etc. and while I can see that it's realistic and atmospheric, it's hard for me to understand even listening in my relatively quiet apartment. In my more usual podcast-listening environment (walking through town, or on the bus) I can barely catch one word in four. And I guess transcripts exist but I don't want to have to look at transcripts; I want the sound design to be listener-friendly.

And, well, nothing so far (I've listened to eight episodes) has made me think the show's doing anything genuinely new with the Magnus Archives world. (If I'm wrong, let me know, okay? No need for spoilers, just tell me if you think I should keep trying with it.)

I would apologize that it's been over a month since I've posted (or, alas answered comments), except that I seem to do that so often that it's become its own routine. I've been meaning to post, really! But the stars (the desire, the time, and the energy to post) have not aligned.

( Some updates under the cut, including allergies, work, shoes, books, and podcasts. It gets a bit long. )

I'm not doing snowflake_challenge in any systematic way, but I quite like today's Challenge #5.

Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:

1. Something your favorite character would like
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A fandom place you would like to visit
4. A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
5. Something you find comforting
6. Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A book or song with a color in the title
9. Something only someone in your fandom would understand


My answers, with pictures and (if I've done it correctly) alt texts are ( under the cut )

Health: I'll put this under a cut.

Nothing gory or TMI, but probably not very interesting.

My sciatica flare-up continues to flare, alas. I was doing okay, actually having pretty long periods of being pain free (with the help of OTC painkillers, gabapentin, and muscle relaxants). And then on Friday at work I bent down, and something went TWANG in my back, and it was not good. I went home early and haven't been back to work since.

That weekend I started taking the leftover prednisone from my last round of this shit. I'd been hoping to avoid it because of its blood sugar effects, but that clearly wasn't going to be possible.

On Monday I got an appointment for a same-day video call visit with my doctor, but several levels of technical failure meant I had to go in instead. So I dragged my sorry ass in--for a while, driving in and having to lean over in my seat at an angle to keep the back pain under control, I wasn't sure I'd manage to get there. But I did, and got more drugs and a referral for physical therapy and a work note, and the pain eased off and was pretty bearable even when I was sitting.

So, on the way home I thought "Why don't I stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things?" I was coping okayish--in considerable but not intolerable pain--most of the way through the brief shop, and then suddenly the pain ramped way up. I gritted my teeth through checkout and carrying my bag to the car and driving home and carrying my bag up two flights of stairs to my apartment, then more or less collapsed in a heap. The rest of that day and the next were pretty bad.

It's still better than last time--I can stand, but only for a minute or two before the pain gets bad. I don't know when I'll be back to work, though. Doc prescribed me a higher dose of prednisone and I'm on day 3 of 5 for that, and I do feel a little better but not nearly as much as I was hoping for.

Doctor also gave me some exercises that I'm forcing myself to do, and a referral to physical therapy (but the PT doesn't start until the second week of September). I guess the goal of the PT isn't so much immediate rehabilitation as preventing this from happening again.

Bodies, why are they so terrible?

Reading:

I finished Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Saving, which turned out to be less of a mystery novel and more of a novel about crime, with literary aspirations. It was fine but not as profound as it wanted to be, and I don't have any real interest in reading the previous book in the series.

I've also read most of Paul Magrs's short stories collected in Silver Jubilee. They're really a kind of fictionalized (sometimes quite heavily, with time travel etc.) memoir, and most didn't absolutely delight me. But they were interesting enough to finish. My favorite was probably "Companion Piece," in which an occasional writer of tie-ins for the cult classic TV show Iris Wildthyme* does an event at a bookstore with one of the performers from the series. It's richly textured, the fannish in-jokes aren't too jokey, and it reckons with life not turning out quite as you'd hoped in a way I found really appealing. (*Iris Wildthyme is a character of Magrs' own creation who appears in several of his Doctor Who novels. She travels the universe in a double-decker London bus.)

Currently I'm reading Blaze Me a Sun, by Christoffer Carlsson, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. It's one of those melancholy Scandinavian (Swedish, in this case) crime novels, but it seems to be going in interesting directions--the protagonist is a writer, and there's a strong meta level about the construction of narrative meaning. The translation's excellent as far as I can tell--it doesn't have that clunky feel that a lot of translations do.


Watching: Good Omens S2, which was hit and miss for me.

Spoilery stuff under the cut.

I'm glad Gaiman finally decided to go ahead and make the Crowley/Aziraphale relationship explicitly romantic, and that aspect of things was very well done. Unlike a lot of people, I'm not upset that S2 ends with them broken up--even if S3 never gets made, it's clear that they love each other and will probably find their way back to each other. I also appreciate the show's careful, joyful, understated inclusivity, with lots of queer people, gender-nonconforming people, angels who use wheelchairs, etc.

As a story, though, it was a hot mess. Poorly structured and poorly paced, which surprises me, because co-writer and co-executive producer John Finnemore knows how to write a supremely well-structured story in which every twist is surprising but perfectly built up to. But GO2 was just kind of a ramble, and while I often like that sort of thing, what didn't work for me here was that the show didn't embrace its rambling. It was trying to pretend to be a tight, coherent story, while actually being a lot of filler and throwaway scenes pasted together. All the flashbacks (Job, the resurrectionists, etc.) were longer than they needed to be and didn't cohere thematically. As for the zombie Nazis, the less said, the better. I was particularly annoyed by that episode because the cathedral sequence in GO1 was so beautiful and so emotionally climactic, and the weird silly gross-out zombie stuff came close to retrospectively ruining that for me.

And then there's the Gabriel/Beelzebub romance, which was a bad idea in principle and completely unearned in practice. A bad idea because, it seems to me, you don't want your B couple to have THE SAME ARC as your A couple. What's the point of showing us Aziraphale and Crowley growing closer over thousands of years, gradually changing and growing to the point where they can love each other, if we're then going to be presented with a far more rules-bound angel and demon doing the same thing in the blink of an eye? It diminishes the narrative, emotional, and even ethical weight of Aziraphale and Crowley's story, which is a damn shame. (Also, I will never stop resenting GO2 for getting that fucking song stuck in my head for days at a time.)

The ultimate unearned twist, of course, was Aziraphale's return to heaven. I didn't find it very believable at a point when we've seen him learn to defy heaven over and over again, to value the earth and humanity and above all Crowley in ways that heaven forbids. It might have worked better for me if we'd seen the temptation itself (the Metatron's conversation with Aziraphale), and of course had some buildup, but as it was, we just got a pretty damn sudden, massive about-face. I'm not saying it was entirely out of nowhere--there were little suggestions that Aziraphale was still struggling--but the story gave them nowhere near enough development. (Cf. the equivalent moment in Our Flag Means Death, which was much better built-up to and did make emotional sense for the character.)

I did like it overall, but it felt a bit like they went and filmed the first draft of the screenplay instead of the final one.

1) I finished Melissa Scott's The Master of Samar, and enjoyed it a lot while wishing it had had one more round of revisions. There's some important stuff (mostly character-related but also plot) that isn't set up properly before suddenly appearing in the last couple of chapters. Nevertheless, I like what it does, and I especially like

Vague spoilers follow; click here to see

Scott's willingness to give us a culture that's both fucked up (patriarchal, homophobic, hierarchical) and threatened by a collapse that would be worse. I like that preventing devastation comes at a cost, and that the cost is very much felt and somewhat resented. I like that the relationship between Irichels and Envar is well-established, stable, trusting, drama-free, and that a situation many other authors would have milked for every drop of sweet sweet angst is treated matter-of-factly.

Thinking about how The Master of Samar is actually helping me get at something I couldn't articulate in my last post: part of the reason some contemporary sff feels "fanficcy" to me in a not-enjoyable way is that the emotional stakes are just too high. Everything's turned up to 11, all the time. Don't get me wrong, I want characters to have emotions and for those emotions to matter. But the centering of those emotions all the time, this constant incredibly intense round of despair and joy and jealousy and rejection and etc etc., feels very . . . teenage. And meanwhile the world needs saving, the revolution needs revolution-ing!

I guess this is why I like middle-aged characters. Not that I'm never drawn to the ones with intense emotions sometimes (see: Teach, Edward), but they've also got some good repression skills going on and can usually turn the drama back down again for a while.

Anyway, yeah. Fanfic, both reading it and writing it, trains us to go for as many intense emotions as can be crammed onto the page, and it's not entirely a good thing.


2) Still listening to Old Gods of Appalachia, still really enjoying S2 despite some trepidation. There are political implications to this arc that I'm trusting Collins and Shell to handle thoughtfully; we'll see.


3) I saw a post on Tumblr with a Saturday Night Live promo pic of Daniel Craig (I think it's from a few years ago), that people were explaining visually references the infamous 1974 French sex* film Emmanuelle. And I thought to myself, self, you have never seen this infamous French sex film.

So I acquired it, and watched it, and it's a tremendously silly and pompous film except when it's promoting rape culture. Interesting as a document of its times, I think, and with a few embedded critiques of cishet-male-centered sexual liberation that disturb the rest of the bullshit in useful ways, but ultimately deeply unsexy. I went to Wikipedia afterwards and learned that the novel it's based on has a gay man and male/male(/female) homoeroticism in a central role; the film took all that out and substituted a rape scene. Color me surprised.

(ETA: *I wouldn't really call it porn. Maybe the softest of softcore. All the sex is simulated, no more graphic than a modern R-rated movie and often less. There's a lot of nudity--all female, no dicks on display--and one notorious scene set at a Thai sex show, in which a Thai woman smokes a cigarette with her vagina. That's graphically shown; nothing comparable was asked of the western actors. Besides everything else, the film has a massive unexamined freight of colonialism.)

Anyway, my point in bringing this up was this: you know the much-GIFed scene from Hannibal where Will is standing against a ladder and Hannibal approaches close to him and it's all very breathless and eroticized? It's a direct visual quotation of a scene in Emmanuelle where our heroine is seduced by a woman for the first time. I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice it, but I'm entertained.

Reading: For now at least, I've DNF-ed Katie Daysh's Leeward. It wasn't doing anything for me, and I mean that literally. I felt nothing for any of the characters and none of the story development, such as there has been, caught my eye. (I know I've said I want slow, less plotty stories. Did a monkey's paw twitch somewhere? For a slow story to work, other things about it--characters, worldbuilding, language--have to be awesome. In Leeward, they're . . . not. And the pacing manages to be both slow and too fast--nothing happens for pages and pages, then emotionally important moments flash past with neither preparation nor adequate follow-up.) I may give it another chance at some point, because I admit I've been tired and not concentrating well. But I don't have high hopes.

Melissa Scott's new novel Master of Samar came out, and I've started that. This isn't an Astreiant novel, but it's of the Astreiant type, with urban life and magical systems out of European history (except they actually work), and a mystery to solve. Since I didn't love Water Horse, Scott's foray into epic fantasy, I'm glad we're back to the kind of thing Scott does well. Her strengths are here, and so are her flaws (functional prose, characters who aren't very distinctly drawn); she's a long-time favorite writer of mine, who was writing queer sff before almost anybody else, and I will forgive things from her that might have me DNF-ing somebody else's book.


Other media: Apparently Rusty Quill's podcast Cry Havoc, which they announced as TMA was ending, finally dropped? I've seen good reactions but haven't listened yet. I don't know if I will. I'm troubled by things I know RQ has done, and I don't 100% believe the other accusations but I don't 100% disbelieve them either. And regardless of their ethics, they've pretty thoroughly demonstrated an inability to make a worthy follow-up to either The Magnus Archives or Rusty Quill Gaming. *shrugs* If it's still around in a year and people still like it, maybe then.

I have gotten back into podcasts somewhat, because I'm back to taking walks 5 days a week and needing something to listen to. Mostly I'm still working my way through the large backlog of the British science podcast The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, but I've also started listening to S2 of Old Gods of Appalachia.

I had mixed feelings about S1 of Old Gods. It was impressive storytelling and technically well-made, with a strikingly unique voice created by the use of the accents and speech patterns of southern Appalachia (where podcast creators Steve Shell and Cam Collins grew up), and a mythos that builds wild, interesting new things on a Lovecraftian foundation. But it was so violent and so gory that I often had a hard time listening.

S2, so far, has been less violent and gory while keeping all the things I loved. I'm liking it a lot. (Sadly, I don't think I can recommend starting with S2, because the stories are connected and S1 does a lot to set up the mythos.) If you're less of a wimp than me, you may not find S1 hard going anyway.

I've tried a couple of other podcasts with less happy results. I keep wanting to listen to Pseudopod (which is a genuine anthology horror series, hosted mostly by the lovely Alasdair Stuart), but I bounce off the amateurish writing of the contemporary stories every single time. (There was a trans rights episode a couple of months ago, which of course I listened to, but it was awful.)

I also listened to the first episode of Malevolent, which has been praised here and there, but again I found the writing really clumsy, full of infodumps and the most awkward rationale for narrating everything that I've ever heard. (Audio drama podcast folks: please just take the audio format for granted. The audience isn't going to ask "why is this well-told, cool story being narrated?" any more than they'll ask "why can I see these people planning their big heist or having an intimate conversation?" about a movie. They will suspend disbelief if you give them the space to do so!) Anyway, if Malevolent gets better, please tell me.

I haven't watched any TV or movies. I keep wanting to go back to seeing movies in the cinema (I'll mask, as I mask everywhere public and indoors) but every time I check there's nothing good playing.

ETA: Make that no TV apart from Taskmaster. Which I'm still enjoying, but my watching has slowed a bit because it does start feeling same-y if you watch too many episodes in a row.

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.