![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Wednesday
Feb. 14th, 2018 02:27 pmWhat did you just finish?
Barbary Station by R.E. Stearns. Adda and Iridian are two engineers newly out of university and in love; Adda specializes in Artificial Intelligences while Iridian is an army vet who does mechanical engineering. Unfortunately in the capitalist dystopia of the future, they're both saddled with enormous student debt and see their only future as signing draconian job contracts that will force them to live on separate planets. So instead they decide to join the galaxy's foremost pirate crew! :D
However, when they reach Barbary Station – the nickname of the abandoned space station the ungendered pirate Captain Sloane has taken over – they find out that matters are more complicated than they appear. Namely, the station is controlled by a murderous AI security program determined to kill all "invaders" (ie, the pirates), and there's no way for anyone to escape or for help from the outside to arrive. The pirates, in fact, have been stuck there for the last two years (long enough for a few kids to have been born) and have deliberately lured Adda there without warning in the hopes that she knows enough about AIs to provide a solution. If she can do so, she and Iridian might just escape with their lives and be given the chance to join the pirate crew. Complicating matters is the fact that most of the pirates fought on the opposite side of the recent war than Iridian did, and some of them might just hold enough of a grudge to secretly kill one or both of our main characters.
So that's the plot. As for my opinion on it.... Argh, I have such mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand: lesbian space pirates of color! INCREDIBLE! And there are some genuinely fantastic bits of worldbuilding. One of my favorites was the notion that people living on a space station don't use terms like north and south or starboard and port, but rather lockside (ie, towards the airlock, towards the outside) and homeward (the opposite, deeper into the station). I loved that everyone in the pirate crew had to justify how much atmo (a slang term combining oxygen, pressure, heat, gravity, and all the other stuff it takes to keep a human alive in space) they used; anyone who cost more than they brought in was likely to get booted. "The cold and the black" is a common substitute for saying "space", which is deliciously eerie.
On the other hand... there are a lot of problems. The worldbuilding is incredibly complicated and prone to being conveyed in confusing infodumps. As a random example:
"The forty ticks shuttle to and from the hub has never been hit before.” Signs in the docking bay below the base put the pirates twenty-three ticks from the docking bay which served as station north at 100/0. That was the point where the increments that divided the station into one hundred virtual cross-level slices started over at one. The shuttle was closer to forty-six ticks, over a third docking bay, if the symmetric modular layout continued all the way around the station. Ring station points of reference were much easier to follow with a mobile map. A more helpful station AI would’ve been nice too. “The shuttle’s a blind spot,” said Si Po.
WHAT. I cannot turn that into an image in my head despite reading it four times now. Indeed, after finishing the whole book, I still have no idea of the details of the often-referenced past war or any coherent sense of what the station or the pirate's hull base looks like; there are all sorts of plot twists hinging on the difference between a regular AI, a zombie AI, and an awakened AI, whatever the hell those are. This bewilderment is not helped by the fact that the book seems to have needed one more editing pass; occasional dropped words or repeated words make things even more confusing. (And I bought a physical copy, so it's not just an ebook's miscoding!) For example: Her armor’s O2 reservoir had enough empty space for the portable tank’s remaining contents. When she connected the O2 tank to her suit, her HUD reported that the suit reservoir had enough empty space for the portable tank’s remaining contents. To be fair, this example is by far the worst in the book. I didn't notice a whole sentence repeated anywhere else.
Adda and Iridian are an established relationship at the beginning of the book, which should be fine – I'm actually a huge fan of established relationships and wish they were more common in fiction! Their romance is extremely healthy and conflict-free. That's nice and all, but it unfortunately doesn't make for intriguing reading. Nothing changes between them over the course of the whole book because there's nothing to improve on from what's already there. The closest thing to a plot in their relationship is that Iridian wants to propose to Adda, but can't find a good moment to do so. That is not exactly page-turning suspense. You can totally write healthy, established relationships that have exciting plots, but Adda and Iridian have no tension, no worry, no angst, no drama, no longing, no victory between them – nothing to make me care about them as characters or as a couple.
In addition, the explanation behind Adda and Iridian's decision to become space pirates never convinced me. I mean, student loan debt sucks, but we've got plenty of it in the US today and roving bands of pirates have not yet appeared. As Iridian puts it at one point, They’d sacrificed all the money they had, their clean criminal records, their academic connections, hell, maybe even their Near Earth Union citizenship, for this. Not to mention risking their lives. I need to believe they would give all that up, and they're just not given enough of a reason. They also seem weirdly disconnected from the reality of being pirates; they both reiterate at multiple points that they don't believe in murder, and Adda even gets upset at seeing a minor character beaten up. I can enjoy the Disneyfied version of piracy myself, but it's a moral dissonance that's hard to sustain for an entire adult novel that's taking itself seriously. What does piracy even mean to Adda and Iridian if it apparently involves nothing immoral?
So, in conclusion... I have no idea. There are amazing parts to Barbary Station, there are dumb parts, there are ill-thought out parts. Do I recommend it? Eh, who knows. Overall I'm glad I read it rather than skipping it, but it could have been a great deal better than it is.
The Birds at My Table: Why We Feed Wild Birds and Why It Matters by Darryl Jones. A nonfiction book about the science and research behind those little feeders many of us hang up in our backyards or apartment fire escapes. From the cover and blurb, I'd expected a light, breezy read, but The Birds at My Table is instead a quite academic review of the various studies that have analyzed how and why humans feed birds, the effect of all this free seed on the birds themselves, and the history of bird-feeding as an organized hobby and (these days) enormous commercial industry. Sometimes academic to the book's detriment, to be honest; I was looking forward to funny anecdotes more than I was to analyses of the calcium/phosphorus ratios in seed mixes or the effect of adding Vitamin E to fat-heavy supplementary foods.
Still, there's lot of interesting factoids to be found here. Did you know that bird-feeding is hugely controversial in Australia, with many wildlife organizations recommending against it? Or that many Australians who feed their backyard birds anyway do so with meat instead of seed? I was also fascinated to learn that one potential cause of the passenger pigeon's extinction may have been trichomoniasis, a disease commonly carried by the non-native pigeon of city streets, and which may have been passed across species by their coming into close contact at feeders.
Overall a good book if you're interested in the topic of feeding birds, but only if you're prepared for a rigorous dive into the current scientific research.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Provenance by Ann Leckie. Continuing my space opera binge! This is set in the same universe as Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy (which I haven't read, though I know everyone on Earth has recommended them to me, I'll get to it eventually), but focuses on different characters and a different place and so can be read separately. I'm LOVING it so far.
Barbary Station by R.E. Stearns. Adda and Iridian are two engineers newly out of university and in love; Adda specializes in Artificial Intelligences while Iridian is an army vet who does mechanical engineering. Unfortunately in the capitalist dystopia of the future, they're both saddled with enormous student debt and see their only future as signing draconian job contracts that will force them to live on separate planets. So instead they decide to join the galaxy's foremost pirate crew! :D
However, when they reach Barbary Station – the nickname of the abandoned space station the ungendered pirate Captain Sloane has taken over – they find out that matters are more complicated than they appear. Namely, the station is controlled by a murderous AI security program determined to kill all "invaders" (ie, the pirates), and there's no way for anyone to escape or for help from the outside to arrive. The pirates, in fact, have been stuck there for the last two years (long enough for a few kids to have been born) and have deliberately lured Adda there without warning in the hopes that she knows enough about AIs to provide a solution. If she can do so, she and Iridian might just escape with their lives and be given the chance to join the pirate crew. Complicating matters is the fact that most of the pirates fought on the opposite side of the recent war than Iridian did, and some of them might just hold enough of a grudge to secretly kill one or both of our main characters.
So that's the plot. As for my opinion on it.... Argh, I have such mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand: lesbian space pirates of color! INCREDIBLE! And there are some genuinely fantastic bits of worldbuilding. One of my favorites was the notion that people living on a space station don't use terms like north and south or starboard and port, but rather lockside (ie, towards the airlock, towards the outside) and homeward (the opposite, deeper into the station). I loved that everyone in the pirate crew had to justify how much atmo (a slang term combining oxygen, pressure, heat, gravity, and all the other stuff it takes to keep a human alive in space) they used; anyone who cost more than they brought in was likely to get booted. "The cold and the black" is a common substitute for saying "space", which is deliciously eerie.
On the other hand... there are a lot of problems. The worldbuilding is incredibly complicated and prone to being conveyed in confusing infodumps. As a random example:
"The forty ticks shuttle to and from the hub has never been hit before.” Signs in the docking bay below the base put the pirates twenty-three ticks from the docking bay which served as station north at 100/0. That was the point where the increments that divided the station into one hundred virtual cross-level slices started over at one. The shuttle was closer to forty-six ticks, over a third docking bay, if the symmetric modular layout continued all the way around the station. Ring station points of reference were much easier to follow with a mobile map. A more helpful station AI would’ve been nice too. “The shuttle’s a blind spot,” said Si Po.
WHAT. I cannot turn that into an image in my head despite reading it four times now. Indeed, after finishing the whole book, I still have no idea of the details of the often-referenced past war or any coherent sense of what the station or the pirate's hull base looks like; there are all sorts of plot twists hinging on the difference between a regular AI, a zombie AI, and an awakened AI, whatever the hell those are. This bewilderment is not helped by the fact that the book seems to have needed one more editing pass; occasional dropped words or repeated words make things even more confusing. (And I bought a physical copy, so it's not just an ebook's miscoding!) For example: Her armor’s O2 reservoir had enough empty space for the portable tank’s remaining contents. When she connected the O2 tank to her suit, her HUD reported that the suit reservoir had enough empty space for the portable tank’s remaining contents. To be fair, this example is by far the worst in the book. I didn't notice a whole sentence repeated anywhere else.
Adda and Iridian are an established relationship at the beginning of the book, which should be fine – I'm actually a huge fan of established relationships and wish they were more common in fiction! Their romance is extremely healthy and conflict-free. That's nice and all, but it unfortunately doesn't make for intriguing reading. Nothing changes between them over the course of the whole book because there's nothing to improve on from what's already there. The closest thing to a plot in their relationship is that Iridian wants to propose to Adda, but can't find a good moment to do so. That is not exactly page-turning suspense. You can totally write healthy, established relationships that have exciting plots, but Adda and Iridian have no tension, no worry, no angst, no drama, no longing, no victory between them – nothing to make me care about them as characters or as a couple.
In addition, the explanation behind Adda and Iridian's decision to become space pirates never convinced me. I mean, student loan debt sucks, but we've got plenty of it in the US today and roving bands of pirates have not yet appeared. As Iridian puts it at one point, They’d sacrificed all the money they had, their clean criminal records, their academic connections, hell, maybe even their Near Earth Union citizenship, for this. Not to mention risking their lives. I need to believe they would give all that up, and they're just not given enough of a reason. They also seem weirdly disconnected from the reality of being pirates; they both reiterate at multiple points that they don't believe in murder, and Adda even gets upset at seeing a minor character beaten up. I can enjoy the Disneyfied version of piracy myself, but it's a moral dissonance that's hard to sustain for an entire adult novel that's taking itself seriously. What does piracy even mean to Adda and Iridian if it apparently involves nothing immoral?
So, in conclusion... I have no idea. There are amazing parts to Barbary Station, there are dumb parts, there are ill-thought out parts. Do I recommend it? Eh, who knows. Overall I'm glad I read it rather than skipping it, but it could have been a great deal better than it is.
The Birds at My Table: Why We Feed Wild Birds and Why It Matters by Darryl Jones. A nonfiction book about the science and research behind those little feeders many of us hang up in our backyards or apartment fire escapes. From the cover and blurb, I'd expected a light, breezy read, but The Birds at My Table is instead a quite academic review of the various studies that have analyzed how and why humans feed birds, the effect of all this free seed on the birds themselves, and the history of bird-feeding as an organized hobby and (these days) enormous commercial industry. Sometimes academic to the book's detriment, to be honest; I was looking forward to funny anecdotes more than I was to analyses of the calcium/phosphorus ratios in seed mixes or the effect of adding Vitamin E to fat-heavy supplementary foods.
Still, there's lot of interesting factoids to be found here. Did you know that bird-feeding is hugely controversial in Australia, with many wildlife organizations recommending against it? Or that many Australians who feed their backyard birds anyway do so with meat instead of seed? I was also fascinated to learn that one potential cause of the passenger pigeon's extinction may have been trichomoniasis, a disease commonly carried by the non-native pigeon of city streets, and which may have been passed across species by their coming into close contact at feeders.
Overall a good book if you're interested in the topic of feeding birds, but only if you're prepared for a rigorous dive into the current scientific research.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Provenance by Ann Leckie. Continuing my space opera binge! This is set in the same universe as Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy (which I haven't read, though I know everyone on Earth has recommended them to me, I'll get to it eventually), but focuses on different characters and a different place and so can be read separately. I'm LOVING it so far.
