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Fourth Quarter 2020 Reading


Plessiez

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1 hour ago, Filippa Eilhart said:

Honestly it read to me like a retelling of a Russian fairy tale with no links to Polish culture at all


Well the home nation is Polnya and the enemy to the East is Rosya, so it's definitely a Poland thing tbf even if she hadn't said so in interviews and mentioned Polish books in the acknowledgements. But Russian and Polish myth and fairytale obviously comes from the same Slavic roots so...
Mind you, the actual fairytale it was retelling was more Beauty and the Beast than anything else, it was the details that were Polish. For me anyway.
 

 


Myth-wise, it was only a tiny thing in the overall context but there's a reference to the legendary king who defeated the dragon via his breastplate with a tooth still in. That -a win after a fight, the evidence of that fight a relic-  seemed to me to completely miss the point of the King Krak legend where he (not at that point a king) defeated a dragon via trickery, and thus also miss the plucky underdog character Poland gives itself via that legend.
It also presents Jaga- and this is one it shares with Russia I know- as a more pure good character than myth makes her to be. Polish Baba Jaga isn't evil necessarily but she's not the hero figure her cameo implies she was so I found that one weird too.

There was also, and this is less myth and closer to some of the cultural insensitivity people are complaining about with the new book, the problem with names. While it's not actually possible to properly pronounce Agnieszka as an English speaker or offer a guide for it, because the 'sz' sound does not exist in English, her pronunciation guide in the acknowledgements never tells you this and I felt like it should, especially since if she was read the book in Polish she should be able to tell the difference (as a Lukasz growing up in England I'm sensitive to that difference). And then she diminutises it to Nieshka, which just compounds the issue, because if you are gonna diminutivise Agnieszka that way- I've only ever met Agas, but google tells me Nieszkas do exist- but it would be Nieszka, and the change in spelling is just annoying. And then at least one other character is only ever referred to by her diminutive - Kasia- when Agnieszka switches and uses her full name most of the time. And also that Agnieszka's name and some others are spelt full Polish whereas others- Marisia - are anglicised whereas others (giving a quick skim, eg Solnya) aren't Polish at all and spelt in a Russian-to-English manner. Which also occurs with place names, frequently anglicised or spelt in an Anglisiced-Russian form. Hell, Polnya itself, we don't use 'y's that way in Poland.

 

 


None of that reached a level where it bothered me seriously - I loved Uprooted- but I can see how the same sort of casual misuse would bother someone from a culture for whom the same kind of misuse is a bigger and more oppressive day-to-day issue.

 

 

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34 minutes ago, williamjm said:

I don't think I've re-read them since the 90s but the Saga of the Exiles/Galactic Milieu books were among my favourites at the time. Marc definitely had an interesting story arc.

I was a fan back in the 90s too.

I remember my dad had the Saga of the Exiles books but he didn't have the second one and this was a pre online book stores time when it wasn't easy to find books that weren't in print (or at least weren't available in most book stores). I think a load of characters had been killed off by the third book and I'd missed it. It was one of the more frustrating things in my early reading.

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On 10/5/2020 at 1:14 PM, williamjm said:

I remember reading that one of Gladstone's inspirations for the story was the 2008 global financial crisis, which does make a change from all the epic fantasies based on things like medieval Europe or Norse mythology.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I started this book and I'm really enjoying it so far.  Not your usual fantasy world.  It reminds me a lot of Fallen London from the Sunless Sea PC game.  Sort of steampunk with more magic.  Mr. Gladstone really does a great job with establishing the atmosphere for his world, I think.

I took a quick break from Three Parts Dead to read Wintersteel by Will Wight.  Like the other Cradle books, I found it entertaining and very easy to read.  Sort of reminds me of the Dresden Files where the protagonist starts as a "level 1" Wizard or Monk or whatever and gradually adds a collection of allies and magic trinkets to level up to fight tougher bosses and collect more allies and magic trinkets to fight tougher bosses.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  I enjoy that kind of thing.

Spoiler

One thing I really liked about Wintersteel was to give Yerin's blood shadow some characterization and motivation.  I enjoy it when authors take villains and let you into their heads.  Not that Ruby is really a villain at this point, but she definitely started out that way.

I also like that we are teased the return of Jai Long (and hopefully his sister).  It's been a while since Cradle had a really good villain who was not just black and white.  Jai Long fit that bill for me, but I guess he will return as a good guy, which will be less interesting.

Now back to reading Three Parts Dead...

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6 hours ago, williamjm said:

I don't think I've re-read them since the 90s but the Saga of the Exiles/Galactic Milieu books were among my favourites at the time. Marc definitely had an interesting story arc.

I was just reading TV Tropes and when I came across the Pyscho Lesbian one which had Felice as an example and I was like "what?" For some reason I had forgotten that. Also, I believe Felice had a thing for Culluket so she might be bi, not lesbian.

That made me go back and reread. :) TV Tropes - reminding me of 30-year-old series ever since I started troping.

6 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I was a fan back in the 90s too.

I remember my dad had the Saga of the Exiles books but he didn't have the second one and this was a pre online book stores time when it wasn't easy to find books that weren't in print (or at least weren't available in most book stores). I think a load of characters had been killed off by the third book and I'd missed it. It was one of the more frustrating things in my early reading.

Dang, at least it wasn't book 3 which is basically the climax of the series, isn't it? Book 4 is just the mopping up...

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6 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I remember my dad had the Saga of the Exiles books but he didn't have the second one and this was a pre online book stores time when it wasn't easy to find books that weren't in print (or at least weren't available in most book stores). I think a load of characters had been killed off by the third book and I'd missed it. It was one of the more frustrating things in my early reading.

The second book is a bad one to miss, particularly the climax, it would be a bit like reading A Storm of Swords and somehow skipping over the Red Wedding.

I remember I read the second book first, which did take a bit of adjusting to.

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1 hour ago, Wilbur said:

I read the original Julian May trilogy in the 1980s, and it was a very fresh and enjoyable set of books for that decade.  I wasn't aware that he wrote a second set in the 1990s, so I will check those out.

The late Julian May was a "she":

http://locusmag.com/2017/10/julian-may-1931-2017/

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On 10/11/2020 at 8:41 AM, polishgenius said:

apparently to the point where Deadly Education is a remake of a Potter fanfic she did

Not really the important point in all this, of course, but something about the idea of publishing (as an original work) something that can be traced back to previously published fanfiction seems somehow ... inappropriate? (I'm not sure what word I want here, really.)

I mean, I don't have any particular animus against fanfiction as such, and I know Novik's been involved in things like OTW/AO3 for decades.  But it seems like there's a big difference between, on the one hand, writing fanfiction as a way of engaging with or commenting on other people's work and, on the other hand, writing fanfiction which you'll later use as material for things that you intend to profit from.

Of course, nothing's ever stopped writers from basing their "original" works on that of other authors, just changing enough names and details for plausible deniability.  One could probably could point to half a dozen well-known novels that appear to do this just for The Lord of the Rings.  And it's probably impossible to write anything about a school for magical children in the 21st century that doesn't get compared to Rowling, one way or another. So I guess it's just the intermediate stage of actual having released the fanfiction to a wider audience that bothers me?

But even ignoring the fanfiction element as such, publishing something as "original" when it's actually not just seems wrong to me.  Maybe it's just a side-effect of spending too much time in academia, but ... yeah, I don't know.  Self-plagiarism is still plagiarism.  If you've written and released something once, you shouldn't do it again (without, at least, acknowledging the previous publication, which would obviously be a bit difficult here).

To be fair, I've not actually seen the fanfic in question (the number of Harry Potter fanfictions I've ever read is one, exactly one more than the number of Harry Potter books I've read, and I plan to keep it at that).  I don't even know for a fact that it exists, or that it's as similar to the book (which I've also not read) as people on Twitter claim.  But it doesn't take more a than a couple of minutes on Google to see that Novik (or, to be exact, an online account belonging to somebody who claims to be Novik) has written quite a lot of HP fanfiction, largely of the type described, so the claim seem pretty credible to me.

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I finished The Poppy War.  Not really sure what to make of it.

Ostensibly, the book is the story of Fang Runin ("Rin"), a war orphan in a loose fantasy analogue of Qing dynasty era China, who surprises the leaders of her rural village by passing the examinations necessary to enroll in the Empire's elite military training academy.  And the first third of the book proceeds much as that description (or the book's blurb) suggests: Rin has to cope with the cultural and racial prejudices of her more affluent classmates and instructors, makes friends and rivals, begins learning possibly magical arts from an inscrutable mentor figure ... nothing really that surprising, though I think the execution is done rather well.

But there's a very big tonal shift about two hundred pages in which completely changes the book:

Spoiler

 

In the first part of the book, the general level of technology, the frequently mentioned Imperial prohibitions on opium, and the reference to two successive 'Poppy Wars' in recent history, all appear to suggest that the Empire is meant to be an analogue of mid-19th century China.  Then the Federation of Mugen -- the Empire's more technologically advanced, militaristic island neighbour to the east -- invades, and it becomes clear that a better comparison is China of the 1930s.  Specifically, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Nanjing Massacre.

At this point, the book isn't about Rin's time in the academy anymore: in fact, she and all her fellow pupils leave the academy for good, despite not having completed their eductions.  Instead, it's about Rin and the rest of the Empire's armed forces being powerless to prevent war crimes, poison gas attacks, mass-murder of civilians and the invading army's systematic use of rape and torture.  And the narrative doesn't shy away from describing all this in somewhat unsettling detail.

There's another tonal shift again towards the end of the book (when the magical elements from the first part come more prominently into play), but if anything this only adds to the general sense of bleakness.

 

So ... yeah, I don't know.  The switch is certainly effective, and Rin's character arc is well done (she's consistently sympathetic despite making a string of increasingly bad choices) but I'm not sure I'm in a hurry to read any of the sequels.

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Finished a re-read of The Mabinogion, the medieval collection of Welsh myths and legends. I first read it about fifteen years(!) ago, and remember being struck by the sheer oddness of things, as well as the sexual content. Now, having spent a couple of months binge-reading my way through Irish myth, I can safely say that the Welsh ones feel much tamer.

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19 hours ago, Wilbur said:

I read the original Julian May trilogy in the 1980s, and it was a very fresh and enjoyable set of books for that decade.  I wasn't aware that he wrote a second set in the 1990s, so I will check those out.

The first follow-up was Intervention, a standalone set in the second half of the 20th Century and early 21st Century showing the gradual emergence of people with psychic powers. A few decades later there's the Galactic Milieu trilogy which shows the aftermath of humans joining the organisation of the title which consists of several different spacefaring races after a political movement begins who want to leave the Milieu (that plot seems oddly topical now). It's both a prequel and sequel to the original Saga of the Exiles books being set years before the start of the Exiles books and a couple of million years after the end of them. I enjoyed both of them, although I was slightly disappointed in the ending to the Milieu books.

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Interesting interview with Christian Cameron from way back in 2013:

https://historicalnovelsociety.org/christian-cameron-talks-chivalry-the-hundred-years-war-and-the-ill-made-knight-with-justin-lindsay/

He has a lot to say about the mythology of the Brits and the longbow, particularly in the 14th century.

 

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7 hours ago, williamjm said:

The first follow-up was Intervention, a standalone set in the second half of the 20th Century and early 21st Century showing the gradual emergence of people with psychic powers. A few decades later there's the Galactic Milieu trilogy which shows the aftermath of humans joining the organisation of the title which consists of several different spacefaring races after a political movement begins who want to leave the Milieu (that plot seems oddly topical now). It's both a prequel and sequel to the original Saga of the Exiles books being set years before the start of the Exiles books and a couple of million years after the end of them. I enjoyed both of them, although I was slightly disappointed in the ending to the Milieu books.

And the structure of the whole thing is really audacious in some interesting ways, although there's a bit of a wicked spoiler if you flip to the back of INTERVENTION and look at the Remillard Family Tree, although since I was reading those as they came out, it also whet the appetite.  Read in publication order and already you know what happens in the Milieu, and yet...

I also happen to have a treasured copy of A PLIOCENE COMPANION, with some interesting notes and the like.  I mentioned the Ring Cycle references which are everywhere, and there's other music as well, lots of opera and the like.

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1 hour ago, Little Valkyrie said:

And the structure of the whole thing is really audacious in some interesting ways, although there's a bit of a wicked spoiler if you flip to the back of INTERVENTION and look at the Remillard Family Tree, although since I was reading those as they came out, it also whet the appetite.  Read in publication order and already you know what happens in the Milieu, and yet...

I also happen to have a treasured copy of A PLIOCENE COMPANION, with some interesting notes and the like.  I mentioned the Ring Cycle references which are everywhere, and there's other music as well, lots of opera and the like.

I loved the ending even though, of course, I already knew what was going to happen.

Some random, small things about the Milieu:

  • I like that May doesn't shy away from the huge Power Perversion Potential of psychic powers. Historically, porn has lead the way to technological innovation* and I'm sure if psychic powers became real, people would be using it for sex/porn immediately.
  • New England split pea soup doesn't seem that appetizing to me. Is it good?
  • How come Rogi has no money while all the other Remillards are rolling in it?

*spoiler

Spoiler

The way that Diamond Mask and Jack find Unity through sex is exactly the sort of thing that would happen, IMO. 

I'm still digesting the series and thinking of maybe tackling Intervention which I have never read or perhaps rereading Pliocene.

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58 minutes ago, Gigei said:

 

  Hide contents

 

I'm still digesting the series and thinking of maybe tackling Intervention which I have never read or perhaps rereading Pliocene.

Oh man, there's a lot you've missed if you didn't read Intervention.  The very ending of the book was a wonderful shock when I first read it and then HAD TO WAIT! to see what that all meant.

I love that the quotes on the back of my hardback omni of Intervention are Jean Auel, David Brin, and Gene Wolfe.  There's quite a lot of Catholicism in May's work as well (given a book entitled MAGNIFICAT), which I'm sure Wolfe enjoyed.

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Finished Abercrombie's The Trouble with Peace. I liked it a lot. A minor quibble here and there, but another solid novel from Abercrombie.

Now reading Anthony Clayton's Paths of Glory: The French Army, 1914-1918.

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4 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Is it beastiality if both participants are turned into the same animals though?

That is a valid point. 

I read the illustrated Margaret Jones/ Kevin Crossley Holland version when I was around seven. Just kind of shrugged at the branch with Gwydion/Gilfaethwy getting it on as deer, boar and wolves. 

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