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June reading blog 2: Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee
...let's try this whole "write a book response right after you finish it instead of agonizing over things and putting them off" strategy.
Can I start off by saying it will never stop feeling weird to finish a book and unexpectedly see a Dreamwidth friend thanked in the acknowledgements (even if I know the author is also active on DW?) The fact that it happens a couple of times a year lately and the first time it was my sister just makes it weirder, tbh. Posting a review suddenly feels a lot more like trying to post fanfic crit, even though I know it's a completely different context.
Anyway, about this book: it was a super fun book! The worldbuilding was amazing and the way the science fiction and mythology worked together was seamless, and it was exactly the kind of space adventure that I want my space adventure to be.
It did feel kind of like someone had come up to a really good writer of epic adult SF and handed him a Formula For Writing A Junior-Grade Novel and he very carefully ticked off all of those things. Which, to be fair, is probably more-or-less what happened! I had somehow filed it in my head as Y rather than J (even though it wasn't), and I've read some Machineries of Empire short fiction (brilliant and amazing) so I think I was just expecting something different in terms of the formula. I think of myself as someone who actually reads, and enjoys, a fair amount of junior grade fiction? But now that I think about it, nearly all of it I've read recently falls more-or-less into the very specific categories of a) very old books (where 'books from my childhood' already count as very old...), b) absurdist/satiric humor, and c) comics, and in all of those, the JG-formula elements work differently than in something that is just trying to be a very good SF story that follows them.
This did give me some motivation to try to rework a couple of my SF story ideas that wanted to be Y-fic into junior grade instead and seeing what happens, though!
The other thing that bothered me a little bit was that the main conflict set up in the first few chapters is that Min has spent her whole life being taught to hide her fox powers and her heritage in order to fit in, because people were afraid of foxes using their powers unethically and if people knew, her family could be hurt; and the specific plot-inciting incidents involve her family being very afraid that if people found out that foxes had done these things, there would be even more of a turn of public opinion against them.
Min spends the rest of the book daring to use her inborn powers and getting very good at it, and also realizing how easy it would be to use them very unethically. Which is all well and good! But she's also using them in ways that could almost have been designed to incite public opinion against foxes (and, before the book is over, against supernatural people in general.)
I like the general theme of 'hiding who you are in order to assimilate is not a solution to anything', and I suppose solving the problem of racism in a subtle and realistic way was probably beyond the scope of a junior grade novel that is also a rollicking space adventure with dragons. But I feel like the problem that was set up in the first couple of chapters is not only not resolved, it's actively erased once the plot gets rolling.
It probably doesn't help that I'm at a point in Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men where they've been talking a lot about the points at which using "people with actually really scary and dangerous superpowers" as a metaphor for racism starts to fail, because real life oppressed peoples don't, in fact, have the inborn power to destroy planets or control minds, so the parallels stop being parallel.
And I don't actually want it to be addressed in this universe, because that would be depressing as hell, and I want Min and her friends and family to be happy. But it felt like it was just dangling over everything like an angry ghost.
And here's my "what do you want the fanfic to be about" theme: ghosts! I love the ghosts in this and how they work and especially how they interact with the technology and how they both are and aren't the same people they were in life. But I am also very curious about how it actually works in a universe where ghosts are very present and real and use the same energy that powers all technology and are common enough that iirc every named character who is dead becomes one. It seems like "one angry dead person can easily disable a warship, and angry ghosts in large numbers are basically invincible" is really going to change how, for example, war happens in this universe, much less other things. I want to read all the stuff exploring that using this universe's ghosts!
I am probably going to bump Machineries of Empire forward on my to-read list (which was kind of the idea behind trying this one first.) Because!! Now that I've finished this, I've read all my library books for the first time in I don't know how long! (Okay I haven't finished Romance of the Three Kingdoms but I checked that out intending it to take forever.) It feels weird and freeing. Probably I should go read that pile of FMKs I'm still putting off, but what I will probably do is get out all the Hugo and Lodestar nominees I haven't read yet instead and then get way behind again. :P
Also I was reading this in public and somebody thought it was Dragon of the Lost Sea based on the title, so I got to have a random conversation about my old favorite queer-as-hell junior grade series about a missing terraforming tool based heavily on an Eastern mythology, which was a great bonus. Crossover time! :D
Can I start off by saying it will never stop feeling weird to finish a book and unexpectedly see a Dreamwidth friend thanked in the acknowledgements (even if I know the author is also active on DW?) The fact that it happens a couple of times a year lately and the first time it was my sister just makes it weirder, tbh. Posting a review suddenly feels a lot more like trying to post fanfic crit, even though I know it's a completely different context.
Anyway, about this book: it was a super fun book! The worldbuilding was amazing and the way the science fiction and mythology worked together was seamless, and it was exactly the kind of space adventure that I want my space adventure to be.
It did feel kind of like someone had come up to a really good writer of epic adult SF and handed him a Formula For Writing A Junior-Grade Novel and he very carefully ticked off all of those things. Which, to be fair, is probably more-or-less what happened! I had somehow filed it in my head as Y rather than J (even though it wasn't), and I've read some Machineries of Empire short fiction (brilliant and amazing) so I think I was just expecting something different in terms of the formula. I think of myself as someone who actually reads, and enjoys, a fair amount of junior grade fiction? But now that I think about it, nearly all of it I've read recently falls more-or-less into the very specific categories of a) very old books (where 'books from my childhood' already count as very old...), b) absurdist/satiric humor, and c) comics, and in all of those, the JG-formula elements work differently than in something that is just trying to be a very good SF story that follows them.
This did give me some motivation to try to rework a couple of my SF story ideas that wanted to be Y-fic into junior grade instead and seeing what happens, though!
The other thing that bothered me a little bit was that the main conflict set up in the first few chapters is that Min has spent her whole life being taught to hide her fox powers and her heritage in order to fit in, because people were afraid of foxes using their powers unethically and if people knew, her family could be hurt; and the specific plot-inciting incidents involve her family being very afraid that if people found out that foxes had done these things, there would be even more of a turn of public opinion against them.
Min spends the rest of the book daring to use her inborn powers and getting very good at it, and also realizing how easy it would be to use them very unethically. Which is all well and good! But she's also using them in ways that could almost have been designed to incite public opinion against foxes (and, before the book is over, against supernatural people in general.)
I like the general theme of 'hiding who you are in order to assimilate is not a solution to anything', and I suppose solving the problem of racism in a subtle and realistic way was probably beyond the scope of a junior grade novel that is also a rollicking space adventure with dragons. But I feel like the problem that was set up in the first couple of chapters is not only not resolved, it's actively erased once the plot gets rolling.
It probably doesn't help that I'm at a point in Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men where they've been talking a lot about the points at which using "people with actually really scary and dangerous superpowers" as a metaphor for racism starts to fail, because real life oppressed peoples don't, in fact, have the inborn power to destroy planets or control minds, so the parallels stop being parallel.
And I don't actually want it to be addressed in this universe, because that would be depressing as hell, and I want Min and her friends and family to be happy. But it felt like it was just dangling over everything like an angry ghost.
And here's my "what do you want the fanfic to be about" theme: ghosts! I love the ghosts in this and how they work and especially how they interact with the technology and how they both are and aren't the same people they were in life. But I am also very curious about how it actually works in a universe where ghosts are very present and real and use the same energy that powers all technology and are common enough that iirc every named character who is dead becomes one. It seems like "one angry dead person can easily disable a warship, and angry ghosts in large numbers are basically invincible" is really going to change how, for example, war happens in this universe, much less other things. I want to read all the stuff exploring that using this universe's ghosts!
I am probably going to bump Machineries of Empire forward on my to-read list (which was kind of the idea behind trying this one first.) Because!! Now that I've finished this, I've read all my library books for the first time in I don't know how long! (Okay I haven't finished Romance of the Three Kingdoms but I checked that out intending it to take forever.) It feels weird and freeing. Probably I should go read that pile of FMKs I'm still putting off, but what I will probably do is get out all the Hugo and Lodestar nominees I haven't read yet instead and then get way behind again. :P
Also I was reading this in public and somebody thought it was Dragon of the Lost Sea based on the title, so I got to have a random conversation about my old favorite queer-as-hell junior grade series about a missing terraforming tool based heavily on an Eastern mythology, which was a great bonus. Crossover time! :D
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Alright what does FMK mean here because my brain keeps parsing it as “Fuck, Marry, Kill” and I know that’s not right
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Also actually a fairly accurate way to describe my reading habits, as well!
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and someone FINALLY after SO MANY YEARS OF ASKING writes me Yuletide fic!no subject
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