Reading Wednesday
Oct. 3rd, 2018 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhKaren Memory by Elizabeth Bear. A steampunk novel set in a San Francisco or Seattle-like Wild West city, starring a bunch of prostitutes in a fight against an evil pimp who may be sheltering a serial killer. Along the way there's mind-control devices, airships, Russian spies, submarines with tentacles, a mecha battle, rooftop chases at midnight, jail breaks, and even a love story: Karen, our narrator, falls in love with Priya after she appears, rained on and beaten, on their brothel's doorstep late one night.
It's an action-packed, fast-moving book, with an admirably diverse cast: besides the lesbian main relationship, there's a transwoman and several black characters, as well as Chinese, South Asian, and Native American ones. The story is told in a first-person strong Southern twang, which seems to have had a love-it-or-hate-it effect on readers; personally, I loved it. Here are the opening lines:
You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like “memory” only spelt with an e, and I’m one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie on Amity Street. “Hôtel” has a little hat over the o like that. It’s French, so Beatrice tells me.
Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I pay my sewing machine tax to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they don’t care if your sewing machine’s got a foot treadle, if you take my meaning.
Which ain’t to say we ain’t got a sewing machine. We’ve got two, an old-style one with a black cast-iron body and a shiny chrome wheel, and one of the new steel-geared brass ones that run on water pressure, such that you stand inside of and move with your whole body, and it does the cutting and stitching and steam pressing, too.
Them two machines sit out in a corner of the parlor as kind of a joke.
I do have a complaint though: as fun as the book is, it feels shallow. I never engaged with the characters or their emotions. Though maybe that's not really a problem – after all, does anyone expect a popcorn movie to have deep characters? Probably not, and 'popcorn movie' is definitely the tone Karen Memory is going for. But I still wish I'd gotten just a bit deeper of a connection to these people and this world because it is just so cool.
Rocannon’s World by Ursula K Le Guin. This is Le Guin's first published novel, though you wouldn't guess that by reading it: there's worldbuilding and backstory mentioned throughout that make it feel very much like the middle of a series. It's also more of a novella than a novel, just about 90 pages long.
Rocannon’s World is the story of a few generations on a low-technology planet encountering a high-technology galaxy-spanning empire, and how they completely don't understand one another. Which leads to a really charming mix of fairy tales and sci-fi, depending on who's telling the story. A woman takes a voyage on a faster-than-lightspeed ship, never having heard of Einstein's Theory of Relativity; she returns home to find that though it felt like one night to her, for her family decades have passed. A man wears a space suit with shielding against high temperatures; witnesses see a legend who can stand in a fire and not be burned. There's a group of strange vampiric winged human-sized insects, which may be demons or perhaps just an unstudied species of animal. There are museums and long-range missiles, drafty Beowulf-esque halls and debts of honor. And there are flying cats that you can ride, and even joust! (Okay, that one's not particularly sci-fi, I just loved it.)
It's a thoughtful, lovely work, and though I think the prologue (which was apparently published first as a separate short story) is more compelling than the main body of the novel, they're both well worth reading.
It's an action-packed, fast-moving book, with an admirably diverse cast: besides the lesbian main relationship, there's a transwoman and several black characters, as well as Chinese, South Asian, and Native American ones. The story is told in a first-person strong Southern twang, which seems to have had a love-it-or-hate-it effect on readers; personally, I loved it. Here are the opening lines:
You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like “memory” only spelt with an e, and I’m one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie on Amity Street. “Hôtel” has a little hat over the o like that. It’s French, so Beatrice tells me.
Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I pay my sewing machine tax to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they don’t care if your sewing machine’s got a foot treadle, if you take my meaning.
Which ain’t to say we ain’t got a sewing machine. We’ve got two, an old-style one with a black cast-iron body and a shiny chrome wheel, and one of the new steel-geared brass ones that run on water pressure, such that you stand inside of and move with your whole body, and it does the cutting and stitching and steam pressing, too.
Them two machines sit out in a corner of the parlor as kind of a joke.
I do have a complaint though: as fun as the book is, it feels shallow. I never engaged with the characters or their emotions. Though maybe that's not really a problem – after all, does anyone expect a popcorn movie to have deep characters? Probably not, and 'popcorn movie' is definitely the tone Karen Memory is going for. But I still wish I'd gotten just a bit deeper of a connection to these people and this world because it is just so cool.
Rocannon’s World by Ursula K Le Guin. This is Le Guin's first published novel, though you wouldn't guess that by reading it: there's worldbuilding and backstory mentioned throughout that make it feel very much like the middle of a series. It's also more of a novella than a novel, just about 90 pages long.
Rocannon’s World is the story of a few generations on a low-technology planet encountering a high-technology galaxy-spanning empire, and how they completely don't understand one another. Which leads to a really charming mix of fairy tales and sci-fi, depending on who's telling the story. A woman takes a voyage on a faster-than-lightspeed ship, never having heard of Einstein's Theory of Relativity; she returns home to find that though it felt like one night to her, for her family decades have passed. A man wears a space suit with shielding against high temperatures; witnesses see a legend who can stand in a fire and not be burned. There's a group of strange vampiric winged human-sized insects, which may be demons or perhaps just an unstudied species of animal. There are museums and long-range missiles, drafty Beowulf-esque halls and debts of honor. And there are flying cats that you can ride, and even joust! (Okay, that one's not particularly sci-fi, I just loved it.)
It's a thoughtful, lovely work, and though I think the prologue (which was apparently published first as a separate short story) is more compelling than the main body of the novel, they're both well worth reading.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-04 01:29 am (UTC)Just because of the respective ages at which I read things, I saw this trick first in a novella by Phyllis Gotlieb, but it works really beautifully in "Semley's Necklace" and Rocannon's World.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-04 09:46 pm (UTC)