Quotes from the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Part Three

So I was reading the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction again these past few days. Despite trying for a long time now, I have yet to actually finish this dense, gigantic tome.

I have posted random quotes from it before here and here.

I felt inspired to read the feminist theory chapter. It was written by Veronica Hollinger.

Although sf has often been called ‘the literature of change’, for the most part it has been slow to recognize the historical contingency and cultural conventionality of many of our ideas about sexual identity and desire, about gendered behaviour and about the ‘natural’ roles of women and men.

See, if it really was the literature of changes (or ideas, which I have also heard SF called), you would think odd and new ideas about gendered behavior would be right up SF’s alley. Don’t you think? It shouldn’t have been slow to recognize things like that.

Feminist theory contests the hegemonic representations of a patriarchal culture that does not recognize its ‘others’. Like other critical discourses, it works to create a critical distance between observer and observed, to defamiliarize certain taken-for-granted aspects of ordinary human reality, ‘denaturalizing’ situations of historical inequity and/or oppression that otherwise may appear inevitable to us, if indeed we notice them at all. The concept of defamiliarization – of making strange – has also, of course, long been associated with sf.

This, yes. As a writer, I don’t believe lofty goals like this should be the first aim of fiction (any fiction!). IMHO, the first aim of fiction is entertainment. But this makes a dandy secondary goal to shoot for. How to do it is another question . . .

It is also significant that many challenges to the conventions of male/female relations have focused on a radical critique of these relations as based in the inequities of what Adrienne Rich first identified as ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.

I am not entirely what this means, but it sounds interesting.

Friday Flash: Fourth Birthday Parade

This fridayflash is for the fourth anniversary bloghop at the friday flash website. The idea is to write a story 400 words long about the 4th anniversary/birthday of something. After several false starts, I finally managed. I was inspired by this picture:

A few excerpts from the Annals of Dead or Lost Colonies:

Dear Julie,

The colony has just gotten the order for the hyperspace module. It’s taken a year, but we finally have it. This will be the first of many letters until you can come here.

I have a house. It’s small, but it has a garden. It’s ours, free and clear.

The hypo gardens are not doing well. Except for the lantern cherries. I don’t understand it. There is a group studying the problem.

Yours always,

Ben

 

Dear Julie,

I miss you. Will you come soon? I’ve added two bedrooms to the house for the children. There is plenty of space. Hyperspace travel is very safe, don’t worry.

The colony celebrated our third birthday with a grand parade. I was in the lead float, as the directory of horticulture. It was quite wonderful.

The lantern cherry have become our biggest – our only! – export. They are in demand and tasty. I suppose it’s good they grow bigger here than anywhere else. They look more like giant melons than cherries. But I don’t quite understand why nothing else growing.

Yours always,

Ben

 

Dear Julie,

I’ve been promoted, dear. I am now president of the horticulture department. The last president died quite unexpectedly in the Greenhouse A. Poor Jerry. At least he died at work. Greenhouse A is where we first started the lantern cherries. We have ten, now.

The colony’s fourth birthday is in a month and we are providing cherries for the decoration. The last of the flowers died months ago and we haven’t been successful in growing any others. Not even marigolds. It’s baffling.

I do wish you would come. I know the ships scare you, but hyperspace travel is so fast these days. You wouldn’t have to spend months on a ship in normal space. I dearly want to see the children, dear.

Love yours,

Ben

 

Dear Julie,

Don’t come! Stay away! God, I am glad you never came.

The cherries destroyed the parade. It was mad. They exploded and attacked and will take over the planet shortly.

This will be the last message I send.

I am going to blow up the greenhouses and take as many of the cherries as I can.

This is why nothing else grew. They’ve been devouring them, the murderous, subtle lantern cherries.

I bet they killed poor Jerry.

Yours forever,

Ben

N is for Necessity’s Child (Teaser Tuesday)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Yes, I chose to start Necessity’s Child yesterday exactly because the title starts with N and I needed an N post. Also, this book has been on my TBR list for a couple of weeks now and I figure it’s time to move the book to the top of the pile. It’s Liaden Universe book, which are usually fun.

The first two lines are:

Inside the duct, it was hot and wet – nothing new there, thought Kezzi, shifting her weight carefully. The metal snapped in complaint, and she made herself be still.

-  Necessity’s Child by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

This is a Baen book and the first nine chapters are available on Baen’s website.

H is for Hard Fantasy

I may be behind the times, but I never heard of hard fantasy before. In fact, I only discovered this sub-genre on a Goodreads discussion forum. (One of those where people try to figure out what the difference is between science fiction and fantasy.)

The person provided quite a few links, including a wiki article. Wikipedia says the Recluce Saga, a Song of Ice and Fire and Magic, Inc. are examples of hard fantasy. Looking through Goodreads and LibraryThing shelves, people have also tagged Lord of the Rings, the Farseer trilogy and The Family Trade as hard fantasy.

There is an article that was posted in 2008, but I’ve never heard of hard fantasy until now. Well, shows what I know, huh?

From what I understand, hard fantasy is the fantasy where magic has rules. Truthfully, I am stunned there is even a sub-genre for this.

Though, yeah, the magical rules of most fantasy don’t have scientific rigor. Some books do treat magic just like it was a science, have schools and everything. Though truthfully, of the books I’ve listed here, only the Recluce Saga comes close to doing that. The others? I don’t know.

I haven’t read a lot of hard science fiction. Maybe that’s where my own disconnect is coming from. But most science fiction don’t have a lot of a scientific rigor, either.

But since people have tagged them as hard fantasy, I don’t think I understand what makes a book hard fantasy at all.

Teaser Tuesday: The Hammer

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by shouldbereading.WordPress.com.

You just post two sentences from whatever you are reading.

Do you swear to act with impartial justice, excluding all tainted Data Entry, exercising only the Authorized Codes, deviating not from the subroutines of Correct Evaluation?

- The Hammer by David Drake and SM Sterling.

Still cracking up . . .

Prayer to the Computer Gods

I am reading a science fiction book where the prayers go something like this:

Computer Angel

Code not our sins; let them be erased and not ROMed in Thy disks.

As we believe and act in righteousness, so shall we be boosted into the Orbit of fulfillment.

Deliver us from the Crash; from the Hard Rads; spare us.

As we believe, so let us Thy Holy Federation be restored in our time, O Spirit of the of the Stars; and if the burden of a faithless generation’s sin be to great, may our souls be received into the Net. Endfile.

It is hilarious. Instructive, too, because this is an author who has turned prayer into exposition. Clearly, at some point in past there was a serious computer Crash that caused the people to turn computers into gods and the internet into heaven.

But so funny! Not to the characters, because religion is a serious business. But I am just cracking up at the mental picture of my computer as an angel. LOL

Also, the Endfile at the end of the file. Funny! LOL

Teaser Tuesday: The Road

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! 

Still reading The Road. It’s good, but it’s taking longer than I thought.

Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said. There could be some corn or something.

- The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Related articles

• Teaser Tuesday: The Road (storytreasury.wordpress.com)
• Teaser Tuesday: The Road (storytreasury.wordpress.com)
• Teaser Tuesday: The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) (myjourneywithdepression.wordpress.com)

 

Halloween and Scary New Realization

Boo! Happy All Hallows Eve!

Today is Halloween and I realized something a little scary yesterday.

I was voting on Goodreads Choice Awards. Going down the genre list, I clicked on science fiction. It showed me this grid of book covers:

And I realized – I hadn’t read any of those books! None. Which is both amazing and creepy. Oh a few were on my mental list of books to read, but I hadn’t actually done it yet. I only have two of these books: Redshirts and The Janus Affair.

Well, I know which book I will be reading next.

Also, I love Google’s Halloween doodle:

It’s cute. And funny. I like how they spell out Google, with the purple octopus and eyeballs and ghosts. So cute! The black cat streaking down the street is especially charming.

Related articles

• Halloween City with its Halloween Stores & Halloween Story since the Origin of Halloween … (carajilloblog.wordpress.com)
• Google’s Haunted Halloween Doodle (news.softpedia.com)
• Halloween celebrated with Google Doodle (guardian.co.uk)
• Halloween: The Day of Too Much Effort (justxjosh.com)

 

Book Review: Catching Fire

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

I finished the Hunger Games trilogy. I read the first book a while ago, than read most of the third book and skipped the second entirely. Last week, I finished reading the second book.

In the aftermath of the first hunger games, Katniss and Peeta are both suffering from post-traumatic stress. Which only makes sense. Katniss is slowly realizing she’ll have to wed Peeta to stay alive and she doesn’t like the idea. Actually, I think she doesn’t like the idea of being forced to do something she hadn’t decided on doing.

There are lots of memorable parts in Catching Fire. The part where she learns she has to fight in the Hunger Games again. The part where she hangs a likeness of the evil president of the Capitol. (That was really good. LOL) The part where her wedding gown turns into a mockingjay bird’s plumage. See, that is something I would love see on the screen. The movie better not skip that scene. Watching Katniss and Peeta really fall in love. The speech she gives on tour to Rue’s people.

But the part that shocked was when Cinna was murdered. I don’t know why that hit me so hard. I wasn’t expecting him to die. Her family, yes, her friends, yes, I figured them to be fair game.

One of most often quoted rules of writing is to murder your darlings and nothing could hurt Katniss worse than to watch her family die. Her sister, Prim, in particular. Rue’s death in the first book was like a foreshadowing of Prim’s death, IMO. I mean, the number of times Katniss compared Rue and Prim, the number of times Rue reminded Katniss of Prim. I half-expected Prim to die in this book or at least come close to death.

Cinna, on the other hand, is a minor character. His death makes sense in the books. But it shocked me. Shocked me more on anything else in the books. But he turned her into the Girl On Fire. He turned her into the symbol of the rebellion. His death devastated me.

But Catching Fire was good. Really good. Catching Fire was better than both the first and second books. I read it faster than the Hunger Games, faster than Mockingjay. It is the best book in the whole series. That’s odd, because it is also a middle book and middle books are usually the weakest in a series.

It has a cliff hanger ending, but I didn’t mind since I had the next one at hand. Otherwise, I think I might have been a little upset. LOL

Book Review: The Hammer of Darkness by L.E. Modesit

Blurb From GoodReads: Martin Martel is an exile in trouble with the gods in this SF novel by the bestselling writer L. E, Modesitt, Jr, now back in a new trade paperback edition from Tor.

After finding out that he has unusual powers, he is banished from the planet Karnak. Martin is thrust into the tranquil world of Aurore, vacation paradise for the galaxy. There he finds that the reality of Aurore is much different from its serene veneer. The gods are wantonly cruel and indifferent to the chaos they cause: are they really gods or just men and woman with larger-than-life powers? Whatever the answer Martin Martel must challenge their supremacy to defend his life, love, and the fate of all mankind.

I’ve read a lot of L.E. Modesitt’s books and enjoyed all of them. Except for this one. The Hammer of Darkness just confused me. I don’t understand the main character, one Martin Martel. I don’t understand his motivations or his goals.

Okay. So. There are gods and demi-gods and terrified worshipers. Odd, for a sci-fi novel. They have really mental powers, I get that. But the mental powers, the energy field they use, their god-like immortality, none of that is explained. It bothered me.

It’s also pretty clear from the writing this is an early book. I don’t know how early, but one of his earliest books. I mean, there is a big difference between this one and his latest book from this year.

What I liked: the main character does some sort of documentary of the religions of the planet. It was pretty fascinating. I would have liked to see more on this aspect of the world.

I think my biggest problem with the book is that the main character never really seemed to connect emotionally with others. He gets woman after woman. I mean, he says he loves this one, than the other one and he really lusts after these two. Another god kills the woman he says he loves, but he does nothing.

Then, later, he goes to another planet and destroys half the world. I never really understand why. He never really gave any reason for going to the other world in the first place. Afterward, the other gods see an opportunity – seeing as how he was away from his power base – to kill him. They fail and that fight that destroys a lot, too, but at least I understand destruction during a fight.

Than he comes back and takes one of the other goddesses back in time and places her as the daughter of a powerful lord in his world. It turns out she was the love of his life. But I don’t get why he took he back to the past. I just don’t.

The last scene is sweet and romantic. Apparently after destroying her rule and figuring out he wiped her memory and placed her as the daughter of a powerful noble, she decides she loves him after all.

I don’t get this book. I just don’t get it.