tantalising piles of books

[helenic]

A few weeks ago I joined my local library, the Marcus Gavey library in Tottenham Leisure Centre. It's a big building with a swimming pool (which I don't visit often enough) and gym classes (I keep meaning to investigate their beginners' yoga), and it also has a library which I'd managed to fail to visit in my two and a half years of living nearby. In the end it was Denny's good influence that persuaded me, with all his talk of having big piles of sci-fi books to read next to the bed in a tantalising, delicious stack. Like pancakes. Or sci-fi books.

I'm quite tired.

Anyway, I have a running list of sci-fi I want/need to read, which goes something like:

• everything by Charlie Stross except Glasshouse and Singularity Sky, which I've already read. (Glasshouse is one of the best science fiction books I've ever come across. Beautiful, thrilling, awesome book - also the most intelligently feminist work of post-humanist fiction I've read by a male author.)


• All the Culture books by Iain M Banks (which I haven't read any of, although I've read a couple of the Iain Banks novels)


• The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, about which I have heard great things from steerpikelet and cyrus_ii


• Everything good by Neal Stephenson (including the non sci-fi ones like Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle), probably starting with Snow Crash.

The library is quite nice, but the fiction seemed to all be jumbled up together. I couldn't find most of the stuff I was looking for, although I picked up The Family Trade by Charlie Stross and Anathem by Neal Stephenson - the only book they had by each author. I also grabbed The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (because I love most of her stuff and I think apart from her new one that's the only novel I haven't read) and Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier (which looked like cheesy girly fantasy and I figured I'd want to give my brain a rest after Anathem). Then I found Denny in the sci-fi section, which consisted of two columns of shelves - not much, but better than nothing. Still couldn't find any of the Bujolds, but I did grab both of the Philip K Dicks they had in - A Scanner Darkly (which I need to read so I can watch the film) and Valis (in case I like A Scanner Darkly and want more Dick. As it were). Denny got one out for him - Air by Geoff Ryman - and then it was closing so we hastily checked them all out with my shiny new library card and their shiny new digital system (probably not that new, but new since I last used public libraries).

Now I have a big tantalising pile of sci-fi and fantasy books to read, and it makes me feel happy in my happy place.

Air by Geoff Ryman
This has won lots of awards and has been read by several of the people I've chatted to about books lately. It is intellectually compelling and extremely readable. The protagonist is a poor rural woman from the fictional country of Karzistan, who starts out with basic social and business cunning, but becomes courageously unconventional after she's affected by the global, non-consensual test of Air, a new technology that will bring the internet into people's brains. I love that the protagonist is a middle-aged, female, illiterate peasant who is deeply entrenched in the social structures of her village - but who becomes a ground-breaking pioneer when she's exposed to technology, developing progressive ideas, amazing business acumen and unashamed sexuality. I adored every bit of the book that was about her learning from Air, the tension between past and future expressed through the slightly magic realist / mystical thing that happens to her during the test, and which leaves her uniquely connected to both past and future. I loved watching her teach her friends, and program the computer with her voice, and learn to make websites - it's affirming and inspiring. The social tensions in the village are well described, and as well as the beauty and power and necessity of universal access to technology, I love how the book respects the characters' relationship with their past, and their land, and their history and traditions and what those things have to offer. It's a really intelligent conversation about tradition and progress that sees the pros and cons of extreme pro-tech or extreme conservative attitudes.

The second half of the book was, as I was reading it, utterly unputdownable - I got dragged into it and was really affected by it. I finished it in a single sitting and felt drunk afterwards, sorry it had ended, frustrated by the questions it didn't answer. But the next day, when Denny asked me what I made of it, I found myself focussing on my frustrations. The magic realist/pagan element becomes increasingly strong, and increasingly implausible. It makes powerful sense as metaphor, but as realistic speculative fiction it kind of lost me. Which is fine - I love magic realism and the narrative was deeply affecting - but I couldn't quite work out how the implausible magic realist bits about the land and babies and destruction and creation and the four elements fitted into the very sharp, very near-future narrative of technology and politics and social inequality. It was like, they were both good and worthwhile narratives, but jamming them into a single story lessened the power of both of them.

Also, it kind of lost me in the middle where she ventures out from her rural peasant village in 2020, which has barely got the Internet, to a high-tech facility in a city - and the technology jumps ahead 50 years. It's plausible, but when you've been reading about rice paddies and making clothes by hand and learning to use the Net through a voice-activated TV, it's weird to suddenly find yourself in a story with technologically-enhanced food that sings and dances, and dogs that talk. I guess that weirdness was deliberate, but I found it broke my suspension of disbelief. It was a shame - that's the part of the book where the big Magic Realist Plot Element is introduced, which is just as implausible but apparently intended to be taken seriously, and I found myself feeling a bit distanced and disengaged.

The Family Trade by Charlie Stross
This is the first in the Merchant Princes trilogy, and I was excited to find it because I hadn't even realised that Charlie Stross had written any fantasy, but he strikes me as the type who would do it well. Denny said he hadn't liked it, Chris said he had, and Denny doesn't like fantasy and Chris and I do, so I reckoned I'd probably enjoy it. It won my heart in the first chapter (which is set in our world) when the first three main characters you meet are ALL female and ALL awesome. The protagonist is a bit Suzanne Church - high-powered single tech journalist in her 40s, very level-headed and independent and snarky. She has an elderly, bohemian adopted mum with all the same level-headedness and snark, and a passionate but unshockable colleague who provides a neat counterpoint to her own experiences. Charlie Stross, you continue to rock my world with how hard you win on gender.

So anyway, this is a basic "person from our world accidentally finds a way into fantasy world" narrative, but unlike the classic variations on the theme, this book is written by a geek in 2005, about a person who is a) female and awesome, and b) lives in the internet world I live in, which makes it way more appealing as far as I'm concerned. She's very sensible and thinks everything through more or less as I would, and records lots of data, and basically responds to the situation with a sound mixture of scepticism and getting-on-with-things. Her contrast with the medieval fantasy world she finds herself in instantly challenges the sexism and social inequality and other bad sides of most traditional medieval fantasy worlds, and it's always refreshing to have an author do that for you rather than having to heckle. But of course it's more complicated than that, the fantasy world being populated by Real People, many of whom are interesting and complicated, and the relationships in the book are believable and engaging. Basically it has all the cheesy appeal of Standard Medieval Merchant Fantasy and Standard Crossover World Fantasy, only done as I would do it, if I were any good at writing novels, which I'm not. Plus it's an illicit business thriller and a Machiavellian political thriller with assassins and ninjas and computer geeks (and looming castles and big poofy princess dresses, but the protagonist would much rather be wearing combat boots and black jeans and sneaking around on rooftops with a dictaphone). I really enjoyed it and want to read the rest of the series.

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier
This was my cheesy girly fantasy fairy book. Turns out (contrary to the impression given by the irritatingly whitewashed cover) it's set in rural Transylvania and all the characters are Eastern European, which makes it instantly more interesting as the Fairy Otherworld is Eastern European, which is both different and similar to the Celtic/French Faery I'm familiar with. It's not very well-written - the prose is very cliche and you can usually predict how her sentences are going to end. But it passes the Bechdel test, and with five sisters who have access to the Otherworld and a big echoey castle it has a flavour of Diana Wynne Jones' Time of the Ghost, which I love to pieces.

Then the fairy story seems about to turn into a emo vampire story of forbidden love (although the word vampire is never used, but of course The Dark Otherworld in Transylvania is populated with vampires), which is disappointing - I want a rural fairy story damnit, if I wanted a vampire story I'd read Twilight. But the protagonist is the sensible one (I like books with sensible protagonists), who is appropriately annoyed by her big sister wanting to be in a Twilight novel, and the interpersonal stuff that follows from that tension is very readable. Plus the basic conflict in the book is not only about Respecting the Spirits of the Land (and they Will Respect You), but also a basic feminist story about an intelligent, independent young woman being bullied by a sexist pig who thinks women should shut up and stay in the kitchen, and her learning to stand up to him is very satisfying. There's a love story in there, which is very classically, self-consciously fairytale, but I enjoyed it even though it was predictable. A fun read - not high literature, but enjoyable and better than I expected.

One disadvantage of shiny digitised library systems: no datestamps in the front of the books. Instead there's a web address where you can login and check your account and renew books online. Which is pretty cool. I kept meaning to check the due date but didn't get round to it. Then I finished Wildwood Dancing today and it occurred to me I'd read nearly half of the books I'd got out, and I should probably find out before I started incurring fines. For some reason, it seemed easier to find the twitter I posted on the day I withdrew them and do some mental arithmetic than to actually find my card, register on the website and check there. Turns out they're due back Monday. Good job my subconscious is paying attention to the passing of time, even if I'm not organised enough to set reminders in my calendar.

Comments

[sevenhelz]

<3

[gominokouhai]

You might find that the rest of the Merchant Princes series loses its way, or you might find that it gets more awesome---opinions vary. Certainly the genre shifts quite drastically later on.

I'm not sure if Charlie deliberately sets out to write feminist literature, or if he just Gets It and it happens by accident. He made a blog post once about trying to make sure that his next book passes the Bechdel test, but that's as much as he's said. I should ask him some time.