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FMK #16: Psi-fi
Sorry for dropping off the face of the internet - life has been coming at me pretty hard the last couple of weeks, and part of that is having to find entirely different scraps of time to use for writing internet posts.
Anyway, I have read Juniper Time and am mostly through writing a review of it, so that should go up soon. I also read Always Coming Home because it was becoming increasingly clear that in order to talk about the sort of stories I want to, I needed to have read it. I'm not sure what I think of it as a novel, but as worldbuilding it is amazing and still haunting me (also I now want to go "forget sedoretu AU just give me Kesh AUs of everything", of course.) I have also made progress on reading both Melusine (not sure if I actually like it, but finding it compulsively readable, also not nearly enough snake-women so far) and Discount Armageddon (like it okay, but not finding it compulsively readable, a++ on snake-woman though.)
I also saw Spider-Man and have to say I enjoyed it more than most of the other recent Marvel movies I've watched (partly, I think, because the stakes were lower and it could just be fun.) I am mostly in it for Karen, to probably nobody's shock, although I am way too invested in Michelle because she is basically 100% me in high school (I'm white, and we weren't a well-funded magnet school so we didn't go to the academic quiz championship because the advisor got arrested for dealing crack halfway through the year and the paperwork got screwed up. But other than that, spot on. So I am terrified they will ruin her for me of course. Also I mostly just want the YW crossover where Michelle and Murph and Vision team up to help Karen with her Ordeal.)
This week's theme is Psi-Fi, for no particular reason except that it's getting harder to patch together themes from what's left. :P
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
Anyway, I have read Juniper Time and am mostly through writing a review of it, so that should go up soon. I also read Always Coming Home because it was becoming increasingly clear that in order to talk about the sort of stories I want to, I needed to have read it. I'm not sure what I think of it as a novel, but as worldbuilding it is amazing and still haunting me (also I now want to go "forget sedoretu AU just give me Kesh AUs of everything", of course.) I have also made progress on reading both Melusine (not sure if I actually like it, but finding it compulsively readable, also not nearly enough snake-women so far) and Discount Armageddon (like it okay, but not finding it compulsively readable, a++ on snake-woman though.)
I also saw Spider-Man and have to say I enjoyed it more than most of the other recent Marvel movies I've watched (partly, I think, because the stakes were lower and it could just be fun.) I am mostly in it for Karen, to probably nobody's shock, although I am way too invested in Michelle because she is basically 100% me in high school (I'm white, and we weren't a well-funded magnet school so we didn't go to the academic quiz championship because the advisor got arrested for dealing crack halfway through the year and the paperwork got screwed up. But other than that, spot on. So I am terrified they will ruin her for me of course. Also I mostly just want the YW crossover where Michelle and Murph and Vision team up to help Karen with her Ordeal.)
This week's theme is Psi-Fi, for no particular reason except that it's getting harder to patch together themes from what's left. :P
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
Poll #18572 FMK #14: SF In Translation
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 27
Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov (1950)
Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh (1988)
The Alien Way by Gordon R. Dickson (1965)
Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Engdahl (1970)
Mindflight by Stephen Goldin (1978)
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman (1993)
Telempath by Spider Robinson (1976)
Triplanetary by E. E. Smith (1948)
A Wizard and a Warlord by Christopher Stasheff (2000)
Today We Choose Faces by Roger Zelazny (1988)
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I didn't really enjoy Enchantress From the Stars that much but it has a really fun central conceit: a girl from a high-tech world meets a boy from a low-tech world; her POV is written as sf, his as a fairytale.
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I seem to recall that my reaction to Telempath was, "Really? You just did that? Why?" Of course, I stopped reading Robinson after college because that was turning out to be my reaction to every single book. I'm not sure if the things of his I read and liked in high school were actually better or if, well, I was in high school.
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Telempath actually sounds sort of interesting now! And that does sound like a fun conceit.
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But I can see how an older reader would want something that dug deeper into the worldbuilding or the character conflicts or something?
I really, really don't care for Telempath, but there are other Spider Robinson stories that I like a lot.
I find that Cyteen, while I enjoy it, has a bit too much for me of the Cherryh-dumps-you-into-the-political-action that often happens in CJC's writing; I can't track the motivations of the different characters. Unlike, say, the Chanur books; or the Faded Sun trilogy; where while there is a lot going on, the central cast is, for me, distinct enough to follow.
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I love Smith dearly, but I grew up on him; I can't remember not having read those books, which means I hit them somewhere before age six. I have less than no idea how he holds up nowadays.
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Robinson and Stasheff have not aged well IMO, and Smith even less so unless you can approach it as farce.
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The Zelazny book has the virtue of being short. I read it in the 80s and don't remember much about it except that it got tangled up in my head with various cyberpunk books people tried to get me to like.
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Yeah the Zelazny's actually one half of an ace double. I usually at least enjoy a good Zelazny, though.
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So same universe but not same planet.
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As I recall, there's an SF frame story, and then everything inside is headed much more in the direction of magic (though still science because psychic powers). Atlantis and Mu and time travel and interdimensional beings and mind control and... Also, the ending bit of the frame story makes my head hurt because a time traveler altering things thousands of years ago does not, in any universe I consider logical, lead to abrupt changes in the time he came from, changes that everybody notices and that don't change the history they remember in the slightest.
So, an F from me on that one.
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My pile of unread books was augmented by the unfortunate happenstance of mixing the long-term unread with the bulk while putting a new floor in the study. I decided if it looked pristine and I had no recollection whatsoever of it based on the plot summary/first pages, I might as well class it as unread. I probably need a FMK poll of my own as I haven't made much progress on the heap this year.
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Anyway, IDK how much you know about it, but it's sort of a novella about a girl named Stone Telling interspersed with about 5x as much text that's just stories/poetry/other cultural stuff from her home, with the conceit that the whole thing is the collection of a time-travelling anthropologist. I think the first time I tried to read it, which was many years ago, I wanted to read it as if the other stuff was meant to enrich the novella, and... it doesn't really, and the novella isn't really my favorite part (and a lot of it doesn't even take place in the same culture that the rest of the book is describing.) But when I approached it this time as not a story but as a collection of cultural materials (and also with about ten years' more learning stuff about other cultures behind me it really, really worked because NOBODY does feminist worldbuilding like Le Guin, period.
...I think it also helped me that I still had my bookmark in from the first time I tried to read it, and started there, and then went back and re-read the beginning after I was done, and tbh I think it worked better like that, because a lot of the stuff at the beginning is.... less immersed in the Kesh world and more interested in making it "relatable" to moderns, I think? And that actually made me less able to get into it than just diving into the Kesh stuff.
It was partly put together from short things that had been previously published, and I did wonder a lot about how the pasting-it-together-into-a-book process workeed.
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Like others I wanted to like Enchantress from the Stars but didn't.
I also agree with the sentiment above - unless you really like novels cobbled together from short stories (I do), start with Galactic Patrol, not Triplanetary. There will be a point in the series where you want to throw the books against the wall due to the eugenics thread or gender politics, whether you do or not is up to you. I'm a firm believer that one can enjoy problematic texts and call them out on their problems at the same time.
I tend to like Roger Zelazny but I don't remember Today We Choose Faces at all.