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FMK #38: I don't have a problem, this is manageable

I am officially giving up on Downbelow Station. I think I've maybe made it another 20 pages since last time? I keep picking it up, reading a few pages, and thinking, "You know, I could be scrubbing the toilet right now."

I'm not marking it K (yet) because it isn't that it's bad or even that I particularly don't like it, and I can see that maybe if I'd read it when I was much younger and found more of what it has to say new and exciting, I might have even enjoyed reading it. So it's getting deferred. Maybe I will take it with me on a trip this summer and find out if it makes a good beach read?

But I will move on to maybe something a little bit lighter, I think - the next on the list is much shorter, if nothing else.

Anyway, let's get polls rolling again! This week, to restart, we will have a very special theme: New books acquired since I put all the other FMK categories together.

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~~ year.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

Poll #19960 FMK #38: Newly Acquired

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 44

View Respondents

The Fire and the Light by Tracy Akers (2011)

F
1 (20.0%)

M
2 (40.0%)

K
2 (40.0%)

Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010)

F
6 (50.0%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
6 (50.0%)

Ad Eternum by Elizabeth Bear (2012)

F
7 (58.3%)

M
1 (8.3%)

K
4 (33.3%)

Nymph by Francesca Lia Block (2003)

F
6 (54.5%)

M
1 (9.1%)

K
4 (36.4%)

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984)

F
10 (62.5%)

M
6 (37.5%)

K
0 (0.0%)

Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (1966)

F
11 (47.8%)

M
11 (47.8%)

K
1 (4.3%)

The Minority Report by Philip K Dick (1955)

F
10 (62.5%)

M
5 (31.2%)

K
1 (6.2%)

The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks by Jen Downey (2016)

F
12 (80.0%)

M
2 (13.3%)

K
1 (6.7%)

Symbiont by Mira Grant (2014)

F
8 (47.1%)

M
2 (11.8%)

K
7 (41.2%)

Plan B by Sharon Lee and Steven Miller (1999)

F
7 (58.3%)

M
3 (25.0%)

K
2 (16.7%)

Lovestar by Andri Magnason (2012)

F
1 (20.0%)

M
1 (20.0%)

K
3 (60.0%)

The Long War by Terry Pratchett (2014)

F
8 (50.0%)

M
4 (25.0%)

K
4 (25.0%)

Bled and Breakfast by Michelle Rowen (2013)

F
1 (20.0%)

M
1 (20.0%)

K
3 (60.0%)

Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power! by Mariko Tamaki (2017)

F
17 (81.0%)

M
4 (19.0%)

K
0 (0.0%)

The Book of Mordred by Vivan Vande Velde (2005)

F
10 (83.3%)

M
1 (8.3%)

K
1 (8.3%)

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (2012)

F
15 (44.1%)

M
19 (55.9%)

K
0 (0.0%)

Far horizons : all new tales from the greatest worlds of science fiction (1999)

F
4 (40.0%)

M
2 (20.0%)

K
4 (40.0%)

The Dragons of Spratt, Ohio by Linda Zinnen (2004)

F
7 (77.8%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
2 (22.2%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Have you read the books that come before Plan B? I'm almost certain that it won't make sense without the two books about Val Con and Miri (Agent of Change and Carpe Diem).

The official numbering of the series is highly confusing because it follows internal chronology rather than publication order and because some of the books can stand alone while others are direct sequels to previous things.

Nope! This was actually the first time I'd ever so much as seen a Liaden novel in real life.

Plan B is the third book in a fairly tightly focused arc with each of the first two pretty much demanding a sequel. I have enjoyed some books in the series, been 'meh' about others, and wanted to throw still others against the wall.

I stopped buying the books because of finding them so uneven and because, years back, Sharon Lee made a few adamant statements online about how terrible it is if any writes meta/analysis of fun books. Apparently meta/analysis destroys joy or something. It irritated me and made reading the books a lot less fun. Not Orson Scott Card levels of less fun, but... It's not as if I'm going to run out of things to read.

Huh! Interesting. The cover of that one seems to strongly imply they're coming back after a hiatus, so I sort of assumed even if it wasn't a great starting point at least it wasn't the middle of something.

They put out three books, including Agent of Change and Carpe Diem, in the 1980s from Del Rey (I borrowed them from a coworker while I was an undergraduate). Then there was a longish gap before anything else came out. Plan B and I Dare came out from Meisha Merlin as limited print run trade paperbacks in the late 1990s. Both books were things that vocal fans of the first three books wanted to see. I Dare focuses on a minor character from the first three published books (I think he's only mentioned) and might make sense independently, but Plan B takes its title from something started at the very end of Carpe Diem and answers questions about where that leads.

The success of the Meisha Merlin editions led to Ace picking up the series.

Local Custom (one of the book meets wall entries in the series for me) and Scout's Progress, which are prequels to the first three books, came out in 2002 from Ace. It looks like Plan B and I Dare were put out by Ace around then, too. My impression is that the Liaden books benefited from early internet recommendations and from the authors being online.

I wouldn't recommend starting the Liaden universe at Agent of Change, even though it's the first written (I think) and starts a main plotline. It's not one of the better-written books and I found Miri and Val Con the least interesting of the extensive ensemble cast. Very destiny, much railroad, wow.

Conflict of Honors is the one I started with - it's a prequel about Priscilla and Shan, two other members of the main cast, and gives some of the swashbuckling soulmate-y Liaden flavor while also allowing the protagonists to opt against jumping immediately into a romance when recent trauma and professional power dynamics were still too much of a factor. (Also there's a friendly f/f relationship and multiple casually bi main characters.) I think it's a good self-contained option for dipping your toe in and seeing if that universe appeals.

There are things I love about the Liaden universe and some of its characters, but I agree with the_rck that they're really uneven. Plan B was a decent one, as I recall, if you don't mind jumping in right in the middle of Plot and trying to figure out who the hell these people are and who's shooting at them.

I've seen it recommended a lot as part of lists of "SF that did non-straight non-monogamy before it was cool", and I know it had a cult following, so I kind of want to read at least one of them just to add it to the set, but I don't really know much of anything other than that. I'm pretty good at jumping in midway on series, though - growing up just reading everything the library has on the shelf will train you in that fast.

Unfortunately the series as a whole is very into Magically Destined One True Soulmates and every single such pair is m/f. Conflict of Honors is the only one I can think of where a main character had a romantic relationship (during the book) with someone other than their Destined Soulmate, and even in that case, the implication at the end of the book was that the Destined Pair would get together eventually. (In books set years later, they're an established couple.)

It's a universe where people can be casually bisexual or have non-monogamous relationships, but mysteriously every single protagonist ends up in a monogamous m/f lifelong relationship. So I don't know how much it really deserves that reputation. *shrug*

Conflict of Honors was also the first one I read and is still the one I'm fondest of. I never really managed to warm to Val Con and Miri, and I adored Priscilla and Shan and the rest of the crew. I was so very disappointed not to get more books about them and their adventures.

I think that I noticed more of the world building gaps in Agent of Change than I did in Conflict of Honors. In the latter, I took that as the universe being really, really big and each character only knowing parts of it. They were traveling from world to world and trading in places with different cultures and laws and such, and the not knowing was sometimes a plot point.

In the former, I noticed missing scaffolding. It wasn't plot stuff so much as the details that would make the plot stuff seem like things that could happen in that universe. There wasn't anything to say they couldn't, but they kind of floated freely as exciting events that could be transplanted elsewhere.

I also liked I Dare better than most other books in the series.

Liaden worldbuilding is very patchy, I agree. The more they tried to build up the massive galaxy-spanning conspiracies, the more obvious it was that they were... not good at building up societies and worlds that made sense. Too many secret societies, not enough infrastructure and local detail.

I Dare was one of my favorites, too. Pat Rin's storyline! I used to go back and reread that thread and just skip over all the other POV sections so I could read it as a continuous story. I think it stood out so much because it wasn't a Special Magical Destiny plot. Pat Rin picks a fight with an entire planet of his own free will.

I think Priscilla and Pat Rin were two of my favorites in that whole cast partly because they both had a deeply uneasy relationship with all the magical destiny stuff they were born into. It's there, but hell if it's going to be the basis of their decision-making. Others were much more complacent and therefore less sympathetic to me (Val Con, Daav).

FWIW, I absolutely love Cherryh, several of her books are among my favorite books of all time, and the ONLY way I managed to get through Downbelow Station (after bouncing off it multiple times) was by a) trapping myself on an Amtrak train for 3 hours with nothing else to read, and b) giving myself permission to skim anything that was failing to engage me. I skimmed most of the first 2/3 of the book before finally getting interested enough to read with full attention (though still with occasional pauses to think things like "JESUS FUCK THIS IS DEPRESSING").

If you still want to give her a try, I would suggest reading literally anything else she's written and then coming back to Downbelow Station later for worldbuilding context for her less depressing novels. It IS a well-written book and I'm glad I finally managed to read it, and it actually has a surprisingly upbeat view of humanity (in the end) given how unrelentingly grim most of it is, but a feel-good summer read it definitely ain't.

Yeah, I think the consensus is I should quit this one for now and try Hellburner first if I want to pick it back up. It's good to know it gets a little more upbeat in the end, though.

Heavy Time/Hellburner is one of the ones I was thinking of in my "favorite books of all time" category, so I support this plan. :D

I didn't care for Mango Street particularly, but fuck it. (Ha I a pun!) I'm pretty sure my problems with that book are the same problems I have with any book in which the down outweighs the up and there isn't any speculative element to thumb the scales.

That sounds similar to my opinion of books that are all up and no down, although at least this one's not too long.

I was soured on Sharon Lee when I heard her offering apology for the anti-semitism in the Lord Peter Wimsey books at a Philcon panel.

Ugh. Yeah, from what I've seen around the nets they kind of strike me as the kind of fen who were fairly progressive for the late-80s/early 90s when they started writing, and continue to be fairly progressive for the late 80s/early 90s thirty years late.

I mean, sadly it's still pretty easy to be a progressive and ignore anti-semitism when it's inconvenient in 2018. But yeah, that was the exact language she used to defend Lord Peter's anti-semitism- "But he's a progressive!" As if somehow that made me ridiculous for saying I wished that someone had warned me before I read the book that I'd see Lord Peter palling around with Nazis.

I don't know how to vote on Symbiont 'cause I don't know/remember what you thought of Parasite.

I don't know anything of Parasite! :D I haven't read any Mira Grant at all yet. Symbiont just happened to be the first to fall into my hands.

I have had mixed feelings on the McGuire ones I've read - mostly that they are fun but often don't seem to hold together on second thought - but I think they are things that may not apply the same way to Grant.

I have voted a rare K to Symbiont because I found Parasite intensely irritating: the "twist" was incredibly obvious from very early on, and too many people were stupid to advance the plot. So I've not read Symbiont and I wouldn't inflict it on anyone else.

Yes! Literally 10 pages into Parasite I was like "Oh, so [spoiler], right?" and halfway through the book I was like "I hope she isn't thinking that [spoiler] is going to be a big surprise at the end."

Spoiler: [spoiler] was the big surprise at the end.

I've read the other two in the series (Symbiont and Chimera) and they do get a little better, but this is definitely not my favorite McGuire series.

Okay, I am going to beg you NOT to read Symbiont. There are a few Grant things that either are or can be read as standalones (her mermaid novel, frex, comes after her mermaid novella but can easily be read without having read the novella, and while she's hoping to write a sequel to the novel, the first one stands on its own).

The original Newsflesh trilogy and the Parasitology trilogy are in no way written to be read out of order.

You know my feelings about Newsflesh and how I encourage almost everyone to read it. It's in no way perfect (although I do think her weaknesses as Grant are different from her weaknesses as McGuire, which I note with deep affection for all of the books), but I think either that or the mermaid novel (Into the Drowning Deep) are the places to start with the Grant work.

I'm fond of Parasitology, but it's probably my least-favorite of her work under EITHER name, so please, please do not let its middle book be your intro to Mira Grant.

Side note:

rmc28 is far from alone in feeling that there's a really obvious twist in Parasite, and the people who think that largely don't like the series. I do want to counter that with the other prevalent take on it, though, because I don't think it's MEANT to be a twist at all. I think that thing is COMPLETELY obvious from very early on in the first book, and it's not at all meant to be a surprise to the reader when it's a surprise to the character(s).

(It was never quite to the point that I thought "wait, there was a twist???" when I saw people complaining about it being too obvious--I knew what they were referring to--but it's like...there are some ways in which Seanan can be very, very subtle, and ways in which she's not, but there is just NO way that part of Parasite was some failed attempt at subtlety.)

Ah, good to know!

Yeah, the downside to acquiring books the way I do (used, cheap, or out of recycle bins) is that everybody hangs onto the really good ones, so I am disproportionately likely to end up with an author's worst books first. :)

everybody hangs onto the really good ones, so I am disproportionately likely to end up with an author's worst books first

Ack. ^^ But I can see how that happens, given those parameters.

Except it was a surprise to the characters and it definitely shouldn't have been unless they were morons, which they weren't.

Well, yes (to the first part of that). I did say it was a surprise to the character(s), not (necessarily) the readers. Whether the characters knew or should've known isn't very relevant to whether readers were supposed to be surprised or not/whether it's meant as a twist.

Putting the rest of this comment into Rot13 for spoiler safety:

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V xabj bgure crbcyr jub sryg gur fnzr jnl nobhg vg nf V qvq, naq bguref jub sbhaq gung nfcrpg ntteningvat naq vzcynhfvoyr, fb pyrneyl zvyrntr inevrf. *fuehtf* V whfg jnagrq gb cbvag bhg gung gurer jnf nabgure vagrecergngvba bs vg.

Downbelow Station is slow, but not as slow as the Foreigner books.

If you like more action and are intrigued by Cherryh, try Rimrunners or The Pride of Chanur.

Good luck with your other reading! :)

It's not the slow that's bothering me so much - objectively, a lot has happened - it's just that everything that has happened has been unrelievedly horrible. :/

Yikes, then I'm not sure what to recommend to you of hers. Most of her books have dark or serious themes, but I'm pretty squeamish and I didn't have a problem with how she wrote about them.

Maybe she's just not the right author for you at all, then.

Fingers crossed you find something you like of hers; she is one of my all time favorite SFF authors.

I read Rusalka and Chernevog and enjoyed them, which is why I bought and kept more Cherryh; those had dark themes, but weren't unrelievedly dark, if that makes sense - you could always at least see light somewhere no matter how dark it was where you were standing. There's no light at all in Downbelow so far.

I really liked the Foreigner books! But yes, they are slow--in fact they're like one really huge ongoing novel split into (what is it now?) twenty books.

The first ten or so were read by a really stellar audiobook reader, but I quit listening when they changed reader. The new one pronounced the alien words/names differently! Couldn't they have bothered to be consistent? And I had a hard time reading the books instead, because I'd imprinted on the pronunciation of the words and they looked wrong on the page. It felt like an odd issue to have with a book.

I found Downbelow Station hard to get into, but I was so glad I kept trying once I did. If I recall, I had a similar experience with Babel-17.
Code Name Verity was excellent. I enjoyed the sequel as well.

Have you read the Pearl Thief? I liked it much more than Rose Under Fire.

I didn't know about the Pearl Thief, but now that I do I will locate a copy. Thanks for the heads up.

I've avoided Delany so far just because everyone says his books are good but hard and I haven't been in the mood for hard books lately, so that sounds about right. (Babel-17 is at least shorter than Dhalgren, which was the only one I owned for a long time.)

I am here as a “kill“ for babel-17. I reread it recently and it hasn’t held up. I strongly recommend starting with his short-story collection! Aye & Gomorrah, in particular the Hugo winner, "time in my pocket like grains of sand," which has the highest world-building to word count ratio I can recall. For the SF novels, I say start with Trouble on Triton. His Memory of Light in Water captures NY in the 60s like nothing else.

Edited ( That’ll show me to rely on voice input) 2018-05-18 16:21 (UTC)

Some of his books require much less work than others. Of the ones I've read, Nova and Babel-17 were the easier reads while also being really good stories; Empire Star and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand were harder but super rewarding; and The Einstein Intersection was hard and imo not worth it.

If you ever do audiobooks the audio of Code Name Verity made me cry for three hours straight; it was stunning.

Francesca Lia Block's good period was so short, and she went so downhill so fast.

I also listened to the CNV audiobook and loved it. An excellent format for this book, which enhanced the effect, I think.

I ... actively hated Rose Under Fire.

I bounced from the blurb. I don’t need rec reading about the camps, thank you.

I don't know if I have time to pencil in three hours of crying on my schedule...

Come to think of it, Francesca Lia Block is someone I was hearing a lot of good about for awhile, and then it just sort of stopped. This one seems to be a short, small-publisher SF erotica anthology, which could turn out to be anything, probably.

I liked Ship Breaker and found it a pretty quick and easy read.

I am suprised by the strong K vote for that! It seems from the summary on the cover like the kind of book I might at least sort of like, and I didn't have any bad associations with the author. Has he done something awful online lately or something, I wonder?

Huh, I don't think so, though I'm out of touch with that sort of thing. Bacigalupi is an environmentalist who used to write for a regional magazine I subscribe to, and a lot of his books are climate fiction, sort of KSR-lite. I liked this better than either of the other two of his books I've read (The Water Knife, which is adult cli-fi, and The Doubt Factory, which is YA "Big Pharma is EEEvil fic") and I haven't read his most well-known book, The Windup Girl, or the subsequent books in the series this one is apparently part of.

I assume The Minority Report is a collection? The PKD work of that title I'm familiar with is a short story (which bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the Tom Cruise movie). I picked marry for that one, because although his short stories were of variable quality, I've found some gems in every short story collection of his I've read.

Marry for Babel-17, too. Some weird, tricksy, probably unscientific but still fun-to-think-about ideas in that book.

I think it's actually just the one story, in a fancy package that makes it seem longer (although they stretched it out to 100 pages, so either it's a *lot* of filler or there's a "bonus story" or it's at least a novelette.)

Huh. Well, I did enjoy that story! If nothing else it's fun to see how wildly it was re-imagined for the movie. The story is much more interested in logical paradox than the movie is.

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