May. 31st, 2019

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Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.

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Social historian Stephanie Coontz’ book, A History of Marriage, has a rather long subtitle: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. Coontz argues, to make an extremely general statement about her research into changes in the patterns of marriage around the world over the past several thousand years, that the essential social meaning of marriage has undergone a massive change in the past 150 years, particularly in North America and Europe.

Coontz argues that, whatever its structure, status with regard to law and religion, frequency, division of labour, and the general condition of the participants in any given society, until recently, marriage has been seen as a social matter, not an individual matter. Its function has been to bind families, communities, even countries, to arrange for the transfer of property and other resources between generations, to ensure a labour force for the future - all matters of concern to the society as a whole, not the people in any particular marriage. As such, marriage was too important to be left to the whims and desires of individuals, it was a matter for families and communities to determine.

“For centuries, marriage did much of the work that markets and governments do today. It organized the production and distribution of goods and people. It set up political, economic, and military alliances. It coordinated the division of labor by gender and age. It orchestrated people’s personal rights and obligations in everything from sexual relations to the inheritance of property. Most societies had very specific rules about how people should arrange their marriages to accomplish these tasks.”

But beginning with the social and cultural changes of the Enlightenment in Europe, the idea of marriage as an individual matter, a source of companionship between two people based on mutual attraction, began to take hold, changing the meanings of marriage. And this shift, from an institution supported, even demanded, by the social and economic circumstances from which it had emerged, to a negotiation between individuals based on personal goals and needs, has led to the growing instability of marriage, and the sense that there is a crisis to be resolved around it.

“These ideals gave people unprecedented opportunities to get more personal satisfaction from their marriages, but they also raised questions that posed a fundamental challenge to traditional ways of ordering society.

If marriage was about love and lifelong intimacy, why would people marry at all if they couldn’t find true love? What would hold a marriage together if love and intimacy disappeared? How could household order be maintained if marriages were based on affection rather than on male authority?

No sooner had the ideal of the love match and lifelong intimacy taken hold than people began to demand the right to divorce. No sooner did people agree that families should serve children’s needs than they began to find the legal penalties for illegitimacy inhumane. Some people demanded equal rights for women so they could survive economically without having to enter loveless marriages. Others even argued for the decriminalization of homosexual love, on the ground that people should be free to follow their hearts.”
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Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.

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Ambiguity Machines is the extremely apt title of a collection of shorter fiction by physicist and science fiction writer Vandana Singh. Singh’s writing is rarely linear, with a single interpretation; her work asks the reader to consider the complexities and multiplicities in life and art, to welcome the ambiguities.

Most if the stories collected here are reprints, but I certainly had not read all of them before, so there was much that was fresh and exciting to me.

The last piece in the collection, and the only new piece, is the novelette Requiem. Varsha, originally from New Delhi, now a grad student in Boston, has come to Alaska, to a scientific installation near Utqiagvik, an Inupiaq village, to collect the personal belongings of her deceased aunt Rima. This is a post climate change Alaska, where the weather is cold but uncertain, and automated oil mining factories roam the land and the ocean floor, seeking the last scraps of fossil fuel for a world that, with the vision of space travel before it, no longer cares about the destruction of the planet. As Varsha collects her aunt’s things, she learns about the polar region and how the ‘big melt’ affected the people who lived by the sacred, vanishing bowhead whale. And how the actions of greedy corporations affected the whales and other species of the north, living in such a delicately balanced ecology.

Requiem is a story about passing through grief to truth, and about surviving, and fighting back in ways that, ultimately heal rather than harm. It’s about communication, between people, between species, between humans and the environment they live in. For those of us who worry about the coming climate shifts, it’s a story of a secret, underground hope that not all will be lost.
bibliogramma: (Default)
Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.

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I’m rather at a loss as to how to describe George R. R. Martin’s latest Song of Ice and Fire offering, Fire and Blood. It’s not a novel. It reads more like a history book than anything else, but every element of the history - countries, towns, people, events, dates, is completely invented. The closest thing I can think of in SF terms are the tedious Dune prequels of Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert, which consist most of chunks of Frank Herbert’s notes with occasional badly written bits of something approaching narrative (I read the first handful of them, strictly for Herbert’s notes).

But Fire and Blood has a certain charm. Setting out to mimic a popular history book, it doesn’t try to be or do anything else. It does try to be a good popular history book. Which actually makes it readable, and interesting, if you like history books, which I do.
bibliogramma: (Default)
Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.

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L. Timmel Duchamp ‘s latest novel, Cherchez La Femme, is rather difficult to describe. Set during a mission from Earth to the second planet that humans have ever encountered alien life on, it focuses, not on the details of space travel, or even the fact that two previous missions have gone wrong in unknown ways, but on the ways that the characters react to the story unfolding around them, even as they create it with their choices - ways profoundly influenced by the nature of their society and their culture’s choices in everything from childrearing to attitudes to alien species.

These humans spend most of their time in virtual realities of varying degrees of privacy, from solo spaces to entire online communities. One character notes that when required to spend an extended time in ‘meat-space’ she had forgotten how to urinate without a catheter. But in order to relate to aliens, this crew will have to spend a lot of time in physical reality, and they are not pleased about that.

Despite their apparent interest in first contact with a new species, there is a great deal of xenophobia surrounding the one, somewhat avian, race they have already encountered, and the humans who have been surgically modified to communicate with them - part of this comes from the fact that neither the aliens nor their human communicators spend much time in virtual reality, which is seen as both the norm, and superior to living in meat-space.

The communicators are, in one respect, superior - something about their enhanced communication abilities also permits them to operate and function in this universe’s version of hyperspace, and to direct information packets through hyperspace to their intended destination.
bibliogramma: (Default)
Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.

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It is generally accepted that one of the driving questions behind science fiction is ‘what if?’ - the desire to explore the consequences of some aspect of human experience under specific conditions. In this sense, science fiction is a vast body of detailed sociological thought experiments, and if one looks, one may find explorations of virtually every aspect of human life, history and culture.

In Science Fiction and Empire, Patricia Kerslake looks at the ways that science fiction has explored power and imperialism, using a post-colonial lens. A large body of work within the science fiction genre is explicitly imperialist in nature, being inevitably concerned with the power relations with a stratified and extensive society - often comprised of a home world and colonies - and how they affect the goals of the protagonist situated within that society. The introduction of an Other, an alien species whose role is to be conquered, repulsed, or incorporated into the existing society, renders the imperialism explicit.
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This short fiction post is a bit short, Morgan must have wanted to write up a few more pieces before posting, but she never did.

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Most of these stories are listed on the Locus recommended reading List or on other Hugo recommendation lists.

“A World to Die For,” Tobias Buckell; Clarkesworld, January 2018.
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/buckell_01_18/
Excellent. Climate futures are variable; the good ones are worth fighting for. Novelette.

“Nine Last Days on Planet Earth“, Daryl Gregory; Tor.com, September 19, 2018.
https://www.tor.com/2018/09/19/nine-last-days-on-planet-earth-daryl-gregory/
Excellent. Earth is slowly taken over by a new vegetative life form while a man’s life evolves around these new species, and the old ways of connecting to each other. Novelette.

“The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat,” Brooke Bolander; Uncanny Magazine, July/August, 2018.
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/the-tale-of-the-three-beautiful-raptor-sisters-and-the-prince-who-was-made-of-meat/
Excellent. A prince of great promise and little brain suddenly takes matters into his own hands, to his detriment. Short story
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Morgan's Heinlein re-read project was supposed to be in support of reading this. She read the first two chapters, and was picking away at the rest in between refreshing her memory of the novels and stories being discussed. It ends in the middle of a sentence, which seems appropriate.

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Hugo-winning scholar Farah Mendlesohn has turned her skills to a long-needed project - a critical analysis of the work of foundational science fiction writer Robert Anson
Heinlein - in a tour de force with the serendipitous title of The
Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. As Mendlesohn examines Heinlein’s life and his writing, the reader becomes aware of Heinlein the author, who, like many of his non-genre colleagues, wrote because he had a great many things to say - about the human condition, and science fiction was the best medium he could think of to say them in.

This characteristic of Heinlein’s - having something to say about humanity, about society, about how humans adapt to changes in their lives and environments - has led to the belief that Heinlein was a contradictory writer, with inconsistent opinions and ideas. This is perhaps because he went beyond the conventions of sf writing of his time, where the author either had no message, or was holding forth on his ideas in the work under consideration. Heinlein’s characters have viewpoints that are not necessarily his own. His books explore themes and ideas rather than telling everyone what to think about them. Heinlein wants you to think, and Mendlesohn has taken up the task of showing us what he wanted to think about - which was not always what it looked like.

Heinlein was handicapped in this goal, however, by his own flaws as a thinker and writer. He questioned so much - sexuality, religion, ethics, relations between men an women - but failed to question his own sources and assumptions about them. He admired the easy satire of Twain - but never achieved it himself.

Mendlesohn has taken this complex subject and pinned down the complications in Heinlein’ writing, revealing
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In the first four months of 2019, Morgan read 41 books or novellas, including seven Heinlein re-reads which she never got around to posting about here.

The breakdown for 2019 was: 19 novels or novellas, 4 non-fiction books, and 18 re-reads, all of them Heinlein novels.

I have no idea which new books she would have called out as particularly excellent, but I do know she enthused aloud to me about Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding and Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

The following statistics may be flawed. I googled each author but did not delve too deeply beyond the topline search results. These stats exclude the re-reads. When in doubt, I classed authors by their country of origin rather than their current country of residence.

By Gender:
Works by women: 74%
Works by men: 22%
Works by non-binary authors: 4% (one book)

By nationality:

American: 46%
Canadian: 20%
UK: 4% (one author)
Other: 29%

"Other" included Japan, Indonesia, France, Taiwan, and Nigeria.

Works by writers of colour: 57%

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Postscript:

The finished but unreviewed Heinlein re-reads were:

Stranger in a Strange Land
Podkayne of Mars
Glory Road
Farnham's Freehold
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
I Will Fear No Evil
Time Enough For Love

Books she began but did not finish reading, in the order they appeared in the "recent" list of her ebook app (the first was a PDF and appeared in a different app. For the rest, the app gives a pie chart icon instead of a % completed number):

Patricia Kerslake: Science Fiction and Empire (7% read)
Farah Mendlesohn: The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein (1/3 read)
Robert Heinlein: The Number of the Beast (1/4 read)
N. K. Jemison: How Long 'Til Black Future Month? (1/3 read)
L. Timmel Duchamp: Chercher La Femme (1/3 read)
Emily X.R. Pan: The Astonishing Color of After (1/4 read)
Holly Black: Folk of the Air 1 - The Cruel Prince (1/8th read)
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Moon (Barely started)
Sue Burke: Semiosis (Barely started)
George R. R. Martin: Fire and Blood (1/8th read)
Vandana Singh: Ambiguity Machines (1/10th read)
Stephanie Coontz: Marriage, A History (1/10th read)
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[updating the date so this stays at the top]

This is Glaurung, Morgan_dhu's partner. Morgan posted her book reviews here on Bibliogramma.

I am very sorry to report that after months of worsening illness, Morgan died on Friday May 3rd. I think she died in her sleep.

Around April 18th, she stopped being able to read, game, watch TV, or surf the net - the pain made a wall between her and the world, and all she could do was suffer or sleep. Fortunately we were able to give her drugs that helped her spend most of her time sleeping.

She was only four novels away from finishing her Heinlein re-read project. When I can stand to look at it, I'll check her tablet to see if she had any reviews prepared but not yet posted.

I'm glad it went so quickly and was over so soon. I miss her more than words can say.

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