Reading porn counts as reading, yes it does

With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, Amber Dawn and Trish Kelly, eds.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m rather selective about the porn I read. The most boring sort for me is the standard male/female porn – especially if it’s aimed primarily at a male audience.

I find reading about sex – vanilla or kinky – between two (or more) women, or two (or more) men much more interesting. I could theorise that this is because same-sex sex is by definition without the inherent implications of the male/female power imbalance, so that any power dynamics and gender roles in the exchange are deliberately chosen by the participants.

Which brings me to With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn. I find the butch/femme dynamic interesting, both in fiction and in cultural studies, at least in part because I don’t identify as either – though my partner, despite being male, identifies as femme. Being femme (or butch, but we're talking about femmes here) is more than a gender identity, it's a sexual identity.

This volume presents a range of interpretations of being femme in sexual situations. And it’s hot reading, too. If stories about femmes at their peak of sexual presentation are your thing, you’ll find at least something in this collection to enjoy.

(no subject)

Snake Agent, Liz Williams.

There are a lot of supernatural detectives going around these days. On TV, and in print, vampires, witches, warlocks, necromancers, werewolves and all sorts of slightly unusual folks are going about solving crimes of a paranormal nature.

I’ll confess to being a fan of the genre, beginning with some of its earlier incarnations – TV’s Forever Knight and the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker (Darrin McGavin is Kolchak, accept no substitutes), the Victory Nelson mysteries by Tanya Huff, the Diana Tregarde investigations by Mercedes Lackey, and so on.

One thing that’s been common to most of these magical mystery tours, however, has been their shared European heritage and Western setting.

Now Liz Williams gives us another take on the paranormal procedural. Set in Singapore Three (in the near future, cities themselves are commercial franchises), in an alternate fantasy earth that’s somewhat ahead of our own technologically, but where gods and demos are real, Snake Agent is the first in a series of novels (three so far) about Inspector Wei Chen, a detective on the Singapore Three police force who has the patronage of Kuan Yin and the magical knowledge and skills required to cross over into Hell if need be to track down a witness, or a criminal. Chen has a few other advantages in dealing with demons, including the fact that he’s married to one. As this is the first novel in the series, we also meet characters who are clearly going to be a part of Inspector Chen’s further adventures, including his opposite number from the investigative forces of Hell, Seneschal Zhu Irzh.

In a genre that can become a little too repetitive (just how many vampire detectives can one handle, anyway?), this novel strikes a new and interesting chord with its use of Chinese supernatural traditions and settings. The book is somewhat light in tone, and brilliantly skewers a number of recognisable personality types and aspects of the human condition, from devout ideologues to self-absorbed bureaucrats, while never losing the forward momentum required of a detective novel.

I’m certainly hooked.

Adapting to humanity

Camouflage, Joe Haldeman

Imagine an immortal shapeshifter – let’s call it, as Haldeman does, a changling - that’s spent millennia on Earth. It can be anything, a rock, a tree, a shark, a human being – but if it is going to function in human society, it must learn how humans behave. And how which kind of human – male or female – behaves. It makes mistakes – sometimes horrifying ones – as it learns to be like a human, but it’s primary motivation is curiosity, and it functions though adaptation.

Imagine another kind of immortal. This one can change its appearance, but only within limits – like a chameleon. One of those limits is that it is always human and male. It is interested only in survival and self-gratification. It is almost always aggressive, and violent. The ultimate Alpha male.

Now imagine that humans have found a space ship that’s been waiting on the ocean floor for millennia while its pilot explores life on earth, have raised it to the surface and are, naturally, trying to see what makes it tick.

You would likely assume that at least one of these immortals arrived in this vessel, and that both are interested in getting access to it. And you’d be right.

In Camouflage, Haldeman gives us a well crafted story with a very interesting cast of characters, many of whom do not yield up all their secrets until the very end of the book. What makes the book particularly interesting – and earned it a Tiptree Award – is the way that Haldeman explores gender roles and presentations through the actions of his two alien immortals as they move toward a final confrontation with each other, the alien spaceship, and the human researchers who found it and are trying to understand it.

One thing that I found interesting in looking at reviews of Camouflage was that even though the text makes an explicit reference to the fact that the chameleon remains the same sex throughout its lengthy history on Earth, reviewers often describe the character as one that can mimic the appearance of any human being. It seems that, in exploring aspects of gender role presentation and construction, Haldeman has in serendipitous fashion underlined another troublesome aspect of conventional gender dynamics – the elision of all human beings under the term man.

A Highland Scot in the Court of France

Dragonfly in Amber, Diana Gabaldon

The second volume of Gabaldon’s saga is just as good as the first. The characters remain interesting and believable, the plot keeps moving, the romance touches the heart and the historical detail continues to give the reader a sense of “being there.” And – very important for me - unlike the gender dynamics of many of the historical romances I’ve sampled in the past, lovers Claire and Jamie continue to be full partners in their on-going quest to avert the slaughter of the Scots at Culloden.

And the use of gendered plot elements continues to be non-traditional. It’s true that Jamie occasionally voices a historically correct desire to give his 20th century wife a beating. However, the radical gender reversal of the standard rape plot, in which it is Jamie who must recover from kidnap and assault at the hands of a man obsessed with him and Claire who must contend with what’s happened to her partner and support his healing, on top of the initial reversal of sexually experienced woman matched with sexually inexperienced man, makes the whole gender dynamic read differently.

The two time periods in which this saga takes place have become disjointed in this second instalment. The 20th century timeline has advanced some 20 years; Diana is a widow with a nearly grown daughter. However, the 18th century narrative continues where it left off, with Claire and Jamie in France seeking to dissuade Bonnie Prince Charlie from mounting a full scale military engagement to regain the Scottish throne for the Jacobite lineage.

Given how the book ends, I’m not sure just how there can be four or five more chapters in Claire and Jamie’s story (and no, I’m not going to spoil the ending of this one), but I’m looking forward to finding out.

A Most Cautionary Tale

Farthing, Jo Walton

One of the most brilliant books I’ve read this year is Jo Walton’s Farthing.

I’m not ordinarily an enthusiast of historical or alternate history novels set in or folllowing World War II, but I’d heard so much about this book, and enjoyed Walton’s other works so much, that I set aside my silly prejudices and read it. And I am very glad that I did, because despite being very fully situated in time, place and culture, this isn’t really about post WWII England at all. It’s about everywhere and every time.

You might not notice this at first, however. It begins with the murder of Lord Thirkie, part of Britain’s social and political elite, at the Farthing country estate during that most classic of muder mystery settings, the English society house party. The London police are called in, the family and house guests are interviewed, various theories of the murder are examined – on the surface, this could be an Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers novel. But right from the beginning there are some things that don’t read as a traditional country house murder mystery. First, the daughter of the house is married, considerably beneath her social status, to a war hero who is also a Jew. Second, this is an alternate history, where Britain negotiated a “peace with honour” with Nazi Germany, thus ending the war on the Western Front and forestalling the entry of the US into the war – and it’s the so-called “Farthing set” who were the driving force behind this capitulation, with Lord Thirkie the chief negotiator. Third, the London inspector has a secret to hide - he is a closeted gay man, in a culture where being gay is illegal. As the investigation proceeds, the truths about who committed the murder and why unfold, but the conclusion is far from what one expects from a country house mystery.

This is a book that shows us, with remorseless honesty, how a society takes the first steps toward 1984. It shows us why it is so true that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

It is also an unflinching picture of how the prejudices of a society – in this case, against Jews and homosexuals – can influence perceptions and can be used both to manipulate the truth and enforce compliance. Fear and distrust of the outsider, fear of exposure and reprisal, fear of speaking truth to power, fear of risking comfort in order to champion what is right, fear of upsetting the status quo and social norms – it’s all here, and as the people who know or guess the unspeakable are, one by one, driven out or silenced, the freedoms of individuals and the obligations of a just and democratic society to its citizens are undermined.

It’s also a beautiful love story, which is part of what gives the outcome its extraordinary impact. How can such a loving and devoted couple not win out over the forces threatening them. How can such sympathetic characters not find a way to foil the plot? How can everything go so very wrong?

The answers to these questions are things that we all need to keep in mind, today more than ever.