86 – Lessons in Chemistry
Lessons in Chemsitry was good. I don’t get all the fuss though. I don’t think it was good enough to warrant it being made into a television show. I don’t think it was innovative enough for it to garner the plaudits it has. I don’t think the character is relatable enough to transcend the anachronism of the premise. But also, it’s kind of a novelisation of The Rise of the Rocket Girls, except framed in an academic – rather than applied – context. It feels… I don’t know, it feels like a book that panders to the expectations of its own demographic. It feels like a book written to explicitly target an immaculately recruited focus group. All of the different pieces of the book feel like off-the-shelf components that snap together – seamlessly in a way that creates a coherent whole, but lacking real authenticity.
So, here’s the main idea – Elizabeth Zott is in love with Calvin Evans, a brilliant chemist who is likewise in love with Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist. Calvin dies, as he must for the story to progress, leaving Elizabeth alone and pregnant in a world designed for the convenience of men. Again, Rise of the Rocket Girls comes in strongly here. Unable to support herself in an academic job commensurate with her talent, she is later discovered by a television producer who is inspired by her scientific approach to cooking. Her televisions show, in which she combines science, seasoning and sex-based right, becomes an inspiring sensation. The world shifts on its axis.
But… maybe it’s me, but I don’t think her ‘Sheldon Cooper, but a woman’ persona would be likely to catch fire the way it does. It’s not been my experience that women, as a broad demographic group, enjoying being patronised. She’s portrayed as cutting away at the stereotype that television needs to dumb-down to its audience. Instead, Elizabeth talks down to her audience and they, for some reason, lap it up.
It’s borderline masochistic.
Anyway, I thought this book was good but no more than good. Predictable, almost cookie-cutter (ironically), in its storytelling. Unbelievable but not unlikable. A solid seven out of ten.
87 – The Fifth Season
The Fith Season struck me as a kind of cross between the Stark’s prediction that ‘Winter is Coming’ and the central planning committee of the USSR Communist Party by way of the Hindu caste system. Imagine a world that is perpetually preparing for a catastrophic shift in the climate. No, not ours. One that is preparing for it rather than throwing its hands up and saying ‘Life’s a lottery, Yolo!’. This is the Fifth Season – a reoccurring cataclysm that comes around every few centuries and remakes civilization in its wake.
To survive these regular apocalypses (apocalypii? Apocalpodes?), the people of the Stillness (the pangeatic continent upon which everyone lives) are broken up into largely independent communities, all connected by a general distribution of responsibilities decided by caste membership – what you’re probably good at is what you’ll probably end up doing. Can you carry a lot of stuff? Welcome to the Strongbacks. You’ll spend your life building and harvesting and planting right up until the time there’s no building to be done and no crops left to harvest. Then you’ll likely be on your own.
Maybe instead you’ll be a breeder, where the output of your loins is all that really matters because you have good genes or wide hips or whatever. Maybe you’ll be a ‘resistant’, someone who just doesn’t get ill and so they spend their lives cleaning shit-stained latrines or nursing the ill.
It doesn’t sound like a fun place to live, but all of these roles pale in significance in comparison to the Orogones, who are mutants born with the ability to control the continental shelf. Orogones are most often killed or given into the control of the Guardians, and the Guardians dictate every waking moment of their lives. If you’ve ever played Bioware’s Dragon Age games, the Guardians are basically the Chantry.
So, we’ve got a lot of raw material here, all of it largely plundered wholesale from other properties. It’s a very competent burglary, it has to be said – everything fits together like they’ve been grooved by an expert. In fact, there’s almost nothing to object to in the writing, or the world-building, or the characters. The Fifth Season is very effective fantasy delivered by an experienced hand. It’s a really fun book to read.
It’s just… it’s exactly what I have found tedious about the fantasy genre for years. It feels like a genre that is mostly about recycling. It’s the circular economy, in narrative form – no premise is ever abandoned, it just gets adapted into future books. Every so often a book comes along to shake things up a bit but in the end all it does is add a little bit of genetic diversity to the ongoing incestuous cross-breeding. You can create a perfectly viable fantasy premise for world-building with little more than a random word generator. Our elves are called X and they have Y as a characteristic. Our wizards are called X and they Y. Our paladins are called X and they Y. Every interesting fragment from a franchise will soon have its lustre rubbed clean off through repetition.
That’s how The Fifth Season felt to me – yet another example where all the fantasy tropes get put into a salad spinner. The knob gets pumped a few times and out comes a world. It is so hard to get excited about fantasy books these days. Looking through my list of books for the year, I can actually see an absence of traditional-esque fantasy books because I tend to shy away from them. I obsessively read fantasy when I was young, and it just feels like there’s so rarely anything original that it’s not worth bothering most of the time.
To be clear, it’s definitely worth bothering with Fifth Season. It’s just not going to map out much in the way of new territory. Its Dragon Age. It’s Game of Thrones. It’s character classes. It’s four pumps of the salad spinner. It’s an archaeologist rustling through a tomb that has been plundered regularly for a thousand years. It’s put together well, but you already know all its parts.
88 – The Secret History of Wonder Woman
This was a disappointing one – I was hoping for an in-depth exploration of Wonder Woman as a character and how she was situated into the record of popular culture. I was looking forward to digging into the subversive themes of the comics, and how they influenced what was to follow. And there is some of that, but the book is primarily a tawdry exploration of the complex polyamorous love-life of its creator(s). It’s less scholarly exploration and more Grazia centre feature. Maybe. I don’t read Grazia, but I assume it’s mostly gossip mongering.
I guess I just don’t find titillation to be worth my time. I don’t really want to know about the sex-lives of celebrities or public figures. I rarely care about the sexuality of public figures, or even people I know in real life. I figure unless I’m going to be involved in whatever’s going on, it’s not my business. And I’m an old man in a (very) long term relationship – I’m not going to be involved.
This could have been interesting – Wonder Woman as a character, as a concept, was actually empowering. Many young women of the time saw her as a genuine role model, and why not? The book glosses over the impact in its search for salacious tidbits of scandal. The book is tedious as a result, at least in my opinion. But hey – I’m probably the oddball here.
89 – Ancillary Sword
I didn’t like Ancillary Sword quite as much as I had enjoyed the previous book. To some extent I found it a little irritating to return to the utter bafflement associated with the writing style. The months between the first and second book had scoured my mind clear of all my comprehension. I also thought the scope of the story was… odd. Too restrictive given the setup of the first book. It felt like a book designed as an interlude rather than the second of a trilogy. That said, it’s still a great book and the universe being described here remains interesting and involved.
I think though that this set of books overlaps uncomfortably (but obviously not completely) with the more transcendent pairing of A Desolation called Peace and a Memory Called Empire. The parallels are significant given that at their core they are both stories of dedicated civil servants (albeit in this book, one of those servants is the corpse soldier of a sentient spaceship) wrestling with themes of identity and belonging. They’re both about the looming spectre of war and the infighting factionalism that is inevitable in any large empire (albeit in this book, the factions are largely made up of schizophrenic clone emperors suffering from a kind of ‘purpose drift’ over the millennia). They tread familiar ground, and given how I feel that the Raven Tower was essentially a retread of Small Gods, I do wonder what Ann Leckie has to say in her books that others aren’t saying better in other books. Obviously she gets ‘first mover’ credit for Ancillary Justice and that’s not nothing.
It’s a good book – four out of five stars – and a solid if a little tepid entry in the trilogy. I just think both this and its predecessor struggle to reach the escape velocity that would make them truly ‘must read’.
90 – The Power
Eh.
The Power is essentially the reverse revenge fantasy of what would happen if women were physically dominant and men were not. Women all over the world suddenly discover themselves to have a ‘skein’ – a previously dormant (or evolutionary underdeveloped) organ that holds and conducts electrical energy. To begin with it’s an odd quirk to be hidden. As time goes by, it becomes a tool to even the odds – the power of electricity versus the physical strength of men. And then finally it becomes a tool of oppression as women put in place a matriarchy that disempowers men in the same ways as men disempowered women in the early stages of civilization.
It is as subtle as ten thousand volts to the testicles.
It’s not an irredeemable book. It’s just a book with nothing genuinely interesting to say about power or oppression… and given how the book is about power and oppression that’s quite the mark against it. Its social criticisms are banal and thoroughly uninspired. A lot of effort has gone into constructing a conception of the world that illuminates nothing more than ‘The powerful dominate the powerless’. It’s a critique of relationship dynamics somehow less insightful than a tweet from Richard Dawkins. ‘Imagine if men had to worry about their bodily autonomy the same way women do!’, is what every page screams at the reader. And in a more nuanced story I think that could have been a really thoughtful premise. But this isn’t a more nuanced story. ‘We’d go nuts with the power!’, is essentially the claim that the author makes but I’m not convinced it’s remotely credible as a conclusion. And I’m not convinced, in the end, because the author doesn’t convince me. I think there’s an argument to be made that this would have been credible in a primeval society (and indeed, there’s some sense of a nod towards that). Power relationships are more complex now. Sexual politics more subtle. Equality is denied in more shadowy ways.
Basically I don’t believe the women around me would kill me for fun if they could suddenly shoot lightning from their eyes just as I hope they believe I would be similarly restrained if that power developed in me. Sure, I’d kill indiscriminately enough that I’d have a much shorter commute into work but I’d be an equal opportunities psychopath. I don’t care what sex you are, if you listen to music on public transport without wearing headphones I’m turning you into a Looney Tunes comic skeleton outline, wreathed in lightning.
Maybe all of this would be fine if the book was well written, but it’s – at best – functional. I can understand why it’s so popular – it asks almost nothing of its readers and provides what is perhaps a cathartic role-reversal torture porn fantasy. I just want more from a book than pandering to the perceived worst instincts of an entire sex class of people.