What’ve folks been reading lately (if anything)?

Subject: What’ve folks been reading lately (if anything)?
Author: Tomash
Posted on: 2021-11-27 11:28:37 UTC

I got my hands on the Library of Congress’s audiobook stash a while back (one of the very few advantages to having wandered across the line to legal blindness) and so have been on something of a book kick (also, yay transatlantic plane trips). And so, I’d like to briefly review

Children of Time A terraforming experiment goes partially wrong, with the uplift virus hitting the planet but not the monkeys meant to be its target, right as human civilization heads into a massive civil war that wrecks the place. Much later, there’s a race of intelligent spiders, who’re becoming a thing … and then an ark ship shows up with what’s left of humanity trying to find a new planet (oh and there’s a half-crazy brain upload of the original scientist guarding the planet). From there, things get … interesting. The book does a pretty reasonable job of showing what it’s like to be a spider, which is what I particularly liked, and also has a gripping plot - though. it does spend a lot of time hovering near potential game over scenarios.
A Memory Called Empire is, at its core, a political intrigue novel, complete with a murder mystery, though it’s listed under sci-fi (and won a Hugo for, in my opinion) the extensive, but not overly infodump-y, worldbuilding of the alien empire at the center of the whole thing. The plot can be a bit slow in places, but for me there was enough world and character stuff going on to make up for it.

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What’ve folks been reading lately (if anything)? by Tomash on 2021-11-27 11:28:37 UTC

*Magic's Pawn*, by Mercedes Lackey by Thoth on 2021-12-01 19:02:25 UTC Reply

Took me bloody long enough. Everyone talks up Mercedes Lackey, but I finally gave her a try with this. And I started here because I am fundamentally predictable and of course I did. Also a friend of mine liked it.

Did I like Magic's Pawn? Yes. Will you like Magic's Pawn? That depends. How do you feel about angst and suffering?

Magic's Pawn is a classic fantasy coming-of-age story featuring a medieval-ish setting, magic, and wizards with magical horses with telepathy who work rather like dragons do in Pern but without the ability to teleport and rather more ability to control the link on both sides (which is to say that the phrase "rising to mate" does not appear in this book, thank god). It's set in Lackey's Valdemar setting, which I haven't double-checked the spelling of yet so I might have messed it up. While not the first Valdemar book, it seems to have been somewhat early, as the earliest works in the setting seem to be from 1985 and this was published in 1989. I'm given to understand it's a prequel to most of the (many, many, many) other novels in the setting, and that its hero is somewhat of a legendary figure in those later novels. To once again draw analogies to Pern (which came a bit earlier but I would say is rather in the same tradition), it seems like this would be your Moreta's Ride in terms of significance and position in the series. Again, this is just what I've been told

I will go out on a limb here and guess that there are probably two strong opinions people might have about this book. One is probably that it's a great fantasy novel about a sympathetic hero struggling to move beyond intense trauma. The other is probably that it's a pointless angst-fest that heaps suffering upon its insufferably irritating whiny idiot of a protagonist for no reason. I will also go out a limb and say that which side of that you fall on will largely be predicted by how you feel about Shinji Ikari.

Which isn't to say Vanyel Ashkevron is the same character as Shinji Ikari is, but there are certain similarities you might notice. Both of them were deeply impacted by the neglect of a father who never seemed to want them. Both of them struggle to connect with those around them, despite a deep-seated need for exactly that connection. Both of them wrestle with their own feeling of lacking worth, and both of them are ultimately brought to their darkest moments after the world punishes them harshly for finally opening up to someone. If you take an intersection of Evangelion (that is, the original series plus EoE) and Magic's Pawn's summaries, keeping only the things that are the same, you end up with something that is more recognizable as a summary of either work than you might expect, even though they are radically different works in a lot of really important ways.

For what it's worth, I find Vanyel a more sympathetic than I ever found Shinji. "Oh, that's because he's gay, right?" No, actually (sidenote: Yes, Vanyel is gay. This is actually extremely plot-relevant, probably should have said it earlier). It's because while Vanyel is more traumatized than I will probably ever be, I can relate to his responses to that pain and trauma a lot more than Shinji's. I look at what he does, how he thinks, and all I can think is that if I wasn't as lucky as I was, that could have easily been me. In fact, sometimes it was me—When I was telling someone about this, I laid out some of the thoughts of a younger me that I had found somewhat similar to what had been happening, only to turn to the next page and see those very thoughts written in ink, down to the ordering.

I said I could relate to you, book. Don't make this weird.

I don't think that I'm particularly unique in this regard. I think a lot of people can probably relate to this protagonist on some level. And while it definitely gave me a bias towards this book, there are other things I like. The worldbuilding isn't exactly the most original, but it's very pleasant. The cast is largely likeable unless they're not suppoosed to be, although how fleshed out a given character is varies, and a few of tjem could maybe use a bit more development. On the topic of further suffering, this book actually has a message I don't see a lot in fiction: that a loving relationship is not the same as a healthy one. And that two people who care deeply for each other, who have the best intentions in the world, who would never try to hurt each other, can ultimately end up being profoundly mutually destructive. That's important for people to know.

I don't think Magic's Pawn is a perfect book. No such thing, and there are things I don't like. Pacing can bit a bit awkward at times, for one thing: some parts feel a bit rushed. But it was enjoyable. And in the end... I almost don't care what my opinion is of this book, because reading it made me think of of someone else.

It made me think about a kid who needed this book. Who needed to see people like him in the books he was reading. Someone he could relate to. Who needed to see someone like him who was gay, needed to know that being gay didn't have to mean being anything other than who he was. Who needed to hear that it was okay for him to be that. That it didn't make him unnatural, didn't make him any less. Didn't make him wrong. Didn't mean he couldn't be a hero.

I thought of a kid who needed to see, in the stories he read, in the language he spoke, in the heroes he admired and the characters he cared about, that he wasn't alone. Because hearing it from someone is one thing. Seeing it, in life, in art, in ink on a page... that's another thing entirely.

And maybe if he'd been able to have that, he wouldn't have spent so much time pretending he didn't know what he was. Maybe it wouldn't have taken him as long. Maybe it wouldn't have hurt so much.

Representation matters, people. If you never see yourself in anything, it makes it so much easier to doubt who you are. To think you can't be real.

I'm not that kid anymore. I haven't been in a long time. But if this book could make things better for someone else, mean something to another kid like that, somewhere, maybe even someone who had it much worse than I did, then I don't know if I can bring myself to care about any criticisms. And I know that that's dumb, and I know that I'm biased: I could say the same with regards to impact of books that I have mercilessly slammed upon reading (Song of Achilles comes to mind). But that is how this book makes me feel.

...I didn't even realize I felt so strongly until I was halfway through writing this. Geez.

The Last Herald Mage Trilogy, as a whole by Thoth on 2021-12-05 13:43:54 UTC Reply
Well that was fast. Apparently I read quicker when I really should be writing a term paper. Anyways... ahem.

I really like the Last Herald Mage trilogy. You might have gotten that impression in my last post, when Magic's Pawn managed to touch parts of me that I wasn't fully conscious of and were actually still quite sore.

But that isn't to say that the books are perfect, so I'll elaborate here on some of the stuff I liked and didn't from all three books.
- Like: aging the protagonist. Vanyel in each of the three books is decidedly different, because they're separated by intervals of years. The books, I think, do a good job of making this change real without losing the sense that this is still the same person. Seeing a single character across such extreme timeskips is uncommon, and it's rare for it to feel like anything of consequence happened in the intervening time that changed the character.
- Dislike: insufficient character development. While Vanyel himself is well-covered, a lot of the rest of the cast, big as it is, can feel a bit flat at times, and critical characters who are really plot important can have personalities that aren't as developed as they should be.
- Like: Gay characters. The writing of not just the characters themselves but also their sexuality is not atypical in the broad strokes, but it's done with care and attention. It is indelibly a part of them, but it does not make them greater or lesser.
- Dislike: Romance. I love some dumb romance but Mercedes Lackey is not a romance writer. She's not trying to be, so that's mostly okay, but there are places where romance plays a key role in the plot, and it could have been better handled—it comes too quickly, it suffers from a bad case of tell-don't-show, and it can be hard to get a sense of interpersonal dynamics sometimes. Although it's not so bad that you can't see the problems with, say, the relationship in Magic's Pawn, no matter how cute it is. So... usually good enough to serve the plot, but no better.
- Like: Setting. Despite being full of terrible things happening all the time, especially in these books because Vanyel Ashkevron is a puppet of a needlessly cruel and unusual fate, Valdemar manages to still feel optimistic. It's still possible to believe things will be okay in the end, even though (spoiler) they're not going to be for our characters.
- Dislike: Age gaps. Look, relationships between older people and younger people can happen. Fact of life. And the book does a lot to make it not weird when it does, but... it's still weird, and I still don't know if I'm totally down with that aspect of the book this happens in. Although ironically, that relationship is more balanced and healthy than the one came before, despite still having some very real issues that the difference in age only exacerbates.
- Like: The complicated family relationships. Your family can be awful but they don't immediately stop mattering to your life, and you can see Vanyel come to an uneasy understanding with the people who made his life miserable. Ultimately, he still cares about those people, even if maybe it would be better if he didn't. And seeing them slowly start to really respect him for who he is is... satisfying.
- Dislike: Suffering without adequate recovery. These books like to make Vanyel suffer. That was written on the sign on the door. He has a bad time. If you don't want to see that, you... probably shouldn't read them, honestly. And the books can cover fairly heavy topics—suicide, for one. But that doesn't mean they don't have to put effort in. These are serious things that actually happen and you need to treat them that way. And for the most part, I don't think the books do a half-bad job of that. Buuut, there is one thing that gets me, and that is in the final book, when Vanyel is captured and gets some truly horrifying treatment. Which... ugh, I can't say it. It goes there. And I don't think that's inherently a thing that Cannot Be Done, but the problem is that the book does not take adequate time to really deal with the ramifications of that. Vanyel is traumatized, and we see that it takes him time, and the care of people who love him, to recover, but that recovery by and large happens in summary with little in the way of any details or anything, and by the time the story gets focused again, he's... well, not fine, but well enough. And I don't think that really flies. Hell, generally when you do something horrific to your characters, you can't gloss over the consequences, something this series ought to know. If you don't, you strip it of all narrative meanine and consequence, and it starts to feel gratuitous and honestly almost insulting in how it trivializes a pain that very real people suffer.
- Like: When emotional trauma does get a chance to heal. It doesn't magically go away, it doesn't stop hurting. The healing process is learning to deal with that hurt. That is how that should be. And when the books want to, they can do this quite well.
These are really just a few things. And lot of the problems I just pointed out tie back to one root problem: density. These books pack a lot into a relatively small number of pages. And by a lot I mean actually too much. Too many things happen, and as a result there's no space to give events the time and care and pages they need. So characters don't get the focus time. Recovery gets cut over. Relationships don't get quite as much time as they need to get built up. A bunch of things that deserve more attention don't get it because there simply isn't space. I suspect Lackey was operating under a page count. I dunno. Maybe she just tries to keep things moving.

But as a result of this, I think that Magic's Promise is by far the strongest of the three books. Simply because it's focused around one central threat, it happens over a short period of time, and there isn't much in the way of timeskips or anything. It feels cohesive and complete and nothing in it feels terribly underwritten. By contrast, Magic's Price goes merrily jumping around, I have no clue what the timespan even is, and it's way way too full of stuff. It needs more space or more cuts, badly.

Despite all this, I did enjoy the series, by and large. It was fun and full of horrible trauma and sadness. Y'know. Like things are.

One More Thing: Fanfic by Thoth on 2021-12-06 02:01:18 UTC Plug Reply

Jeez, I feel like Columbo saying that.

(warning, there are gonna be some spoilers for Last Herald Mage down here)

As I brought up last time, I made it through the entirety of the series with somewhat mixed feelings. These books have a lot to recommend them, and I'm glad I went and read them (I spend three paragraphs on that when I talked about the first book alone, didn't I? None of that changed, even if my greater distance from the later books and the fact that I am older than a lot of people who read this for the first time mean that I can see this stuff in them) but they also have a lot of problems with lacking characterization, things kept off screen that really should be on it, or skipped over when they can't be, and a rape scene at the end that is poorly handled and should have been severely altered if not cut. And miscellaneous other things that mostly just... vaguely bug me, moreso down to personal preference (I bloody hate soulmates. I only even tolerate them here because they're rendered with more complexity than most works that bother with the concept: the very first example we're fully aware of in the books is a relationship between two damaged people that is deeply unhealthy. So it doesn't Magically make your relationship a good one, it's just a very intense bond. Which I find a little easier to swallow, even if I still don't love the idea for... well, a lot of reasons).

What I'm saying is that for fanfic authors this is what we call a target-rich environment. Because when canon has a strong grounding and a lot of flaws, you can go in and actually do things to make it better. Sadly, for a while Lackey had a similar attitude towards fanfic as McCaffrey and the like (same circles, go figure). Thankfully, this hasn't been true for a long long time. So now there is fanfic.

And there are a lot of fics where Tylendel never dies because... uh... fanfic. There will be fixfic for any tragic incident in the plot, it's a law or something. Some of these are good, and worth reading, because they do something interesting with the characters. Some of them aren't. Probably most of them aren't, actually. As in every fandom, you will also find some number of Peggy Sue fics, although I didn't find many in a casual perusal of AO3. But what's most interesting are the fics that aren't trying to AU their way into or out of things, but simply try to expand canon in all the ways it wasn't already expanded.

I will highlight the work of a particular author because I found their stuff first and it's really good: AO3 user Harukami has made a few fics that just... detail out moments we never got to see, mostly highlighting what happens when Vanyel is gone. Shared Burdens is an all-too-canonical-feeling work that gives Medren a chance to shine (something he doesn't often get, to the books' detriment), Last Choices gives us a window into our characters' exchanges with Death, which is just... sad, but by far the best is Good Company, which was written for a prompt (actually I think a number of these were), and gives us a nice chance to see Lissa (she is upsettingly not given the time and limelight she deserves in the books), a good moment for Stef, and... just a heart-wrenching moment of Vanyel acknowledging just how much he had. It's just... really, really good. It feels like it could slot right into the story, and just... makes it ever-so-slightly better. And if you really want a Tylendel-doesn't-die AU fixfic that isn't written to be comically saccharine and still feels like something closer to canon, the same author wrote Orders, which is a fairly solid realization of the concept. So... good work all around really.

Not that there aren't plenty of other talented fic authors in the fandom. I have no doubt there are, but I know not where and when I shall find them.

Recently... by Helsinki on 2021-12-01 14:00:31 UTC Reply

Webcomics/mangas, mostly.

I finished the entirety of the web serial/novel Omniscient Reader, which details the story of a quiet man working at a mediocre job, who finds that the story he has been the sole reader of for years has now started coming to life. It's pretty long, it can get heavy and violent, but it wraps itself up very nicely at the end, and overall, I really enjoyed it.

On a more Hunger Games-esque side, I sat down and read Battle Royale, by Koushun Takami. It was brutal; it was incredible. Highly recommend it.

And of course, my webcomic recommendations, in no particular order: - Kill Six Billion Demons (Violent! Bloody! Fantastic artwork and a great story! Written by someone I know!) - Paranatural - Demon Street

Anyways, I hope that people have been reading good stuff lately. I'm still waiting on a particular book to come out, and I'm always open to more recs.

Happy December, Helsinki