As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem
A professor of anthropology loses his physicist girlfriend to a tiny experimental bubble universe. By which I don't mean that she's involved in a lab accident, but that she falls in love with it and leaves him for it. It's not every day you read the story of a love triangle between a man, a woman and a quantum phenomenon. This is only a short book, but rich - Lethem's good for a quirky turn of phrase and a nice metaphor or two. Always a pleasure to read.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin Abbott
Another brief book, but very satisfying for the brain. Abbott's thought in quite surprising detail about some aspects of how sentient geometric shapes might live their lives (even if he's left a number of other aspects completely untouched on). 2-D society is alarmingly totalitarian, I must say. I don't know if it might have seemed less so to readers at the time. Perhaps we might start a rumour that it directly inspired that other mathematical dystopia, Evgeny Zamyatin's We? Anything for a laugh, eh?
Captain Britain and MI13 vol. 1, Paul Cornell
Birthday book #1. Paul Cornell's avowed intent is to make British comic book superheroes great again, not in a kick-ass American way but in an upbeat, proud-to-be-British way. I must admit that I'm not especially patriotic (not really at all, when it comes down to it), but there certainly is something special, something stirring about a comic book in which a young Muslim woman in a khimar can cry an "Allahu akbar!" of thanksgiving at the sight of a beefy man wearing a Union Flag and carrying a sword. I'm all for that. Plenty of material here with potential for future development.
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Tonight on Fox: When Ingenus Go Bad. A provocative study of People Who Really Need A Good Slap. I think it might be pushing it a bit for the introduction to this edition (1966) to claim that Wuthering Heights is "a thriller in the modern sense", but it certainly is gripping. What I don't quite get is why people - people who have, presumably, actually read the thing - believe that it's a love story, or that naming their children Heathcliff and Catherine is a sane thing to do. Or that Kate Bush's #1 hit could possibly be interpreted as a love song, and not the succubus song of a damned soul.
Wuthering Heights is surely a Gothic horror story. It looks a lot like Frankenstein - man defies nature and a supernatural revenge is visited on him and his family. And here, as in Frankenstein, the defiance of nature and the revenge are both embodied in the same individual - Old Man Earnshaw's Monster, the demonic foundling Heathcliff. His defiance of nature is, of course, to raise Heathcliff as his own favourite child at the expense of neglecting his own children, and it all goes horribly wrong from there. Heathcliff comes across as a Victorian social climber with the surface of polite manners ripped away (or in fact, never applied in the first place). His behaviour, and his corrupting influence on all the characters around him must have inspired nothing but horror in mid-nineteenth century readers. I'd be interested to know if people then reacted to the book in the same way that people now react to video nasties and violent computer games.
My only other question about the Heights is just what accent Joseph, the unpleasant old servant, is supposed to have. I would have guessed Yorkshire, but it reads like a strange mix of Geordie and Scots, with occasional moments of Cockney thrown in. What really gets me is that, even though it must be a second language to them, all the other characters can speak and write Joseph fluently to each other. Perhaps there's a dictionary of it somewhere with agreed spellings, just like there must be one for New England Hillbilly that all of HP Lovecraft's heroes have read.
Edit: Well, now I've seen a few online critiques and commentaries of Wuthering Heights - the Freudian interpretation, the Jungian interpretation, the "storm/calm" interpretation. To these I'd like to add my own response: the "weaponised character" theory. (Surprisingly, not pinched from Jasper Fforde, honest guv.) Perhaps Heathcliff isn't merely a demon in human form, or Catherine's own id/animus personified, but the ultimate in narrative warfare. Perhaps Emily Bronte's novel was an inoffensive, ordinary rustic romance called Thrushcross Grange, until some agency as yet unknown sent in Heathcliff to undermine it. Perhaps, somewhere out there, there's a book that's been infiltrated and converted into the bridgehead for a series of attacks on other books, a factory novel stockpiling Heathcliffs of Mass Destruction? Or perhaps it got into a fight with another book, who knows? Perhaps we should look for the other combatant - a novel that shows the marks of counter-attacks, with its characters and story dented and buckled but unbeaten.
If we can find a novel populated entirely by arseholes who talk in an unidentifiable regional English dialect, so much the better, because that would back up my further theory that Joseph is Heathcliff's "handler".
Double edit: I'm thinking maybe Cold Comfort Farm. It's got videophones in it, which looks suspicious for a start. And Flora Poste would appear to be the counter-attack, sent into a grim rustic novel to subvert it into parody. Success on both sides, then - a Pyrrhic victory.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
First We Take Manhattan
Hey kids, do you like violence? Want to see me stick nine inch nails through each of my eyelids? Zack Snyder does. Zack Snyder sure does love his gore. This is largely the reason why Watchmen is the best film I never want to see again.
Let's see if I can pull a coherent review out of the assembled thoughts that follow. Ware ye big, floppy, luminous blue spoilers.
Positives first. This is unquestionably a very close adaptation of the graphic novel - we'll talk about the small changes in translation in a minute. Visually it's phenomenal, with the title sequence a particular triumph. Dan/Nite Owl's anxiety dream is another notable piece of work. The use of '80s songs to reinforce the story's setting is lovely, and even the incidental soundtrack sounds like something from an '80s film. Very nice indeed. The acting is generally good - I can't think of any glaringly bad performances. The costumes are, perhaps, in the case of the superheroes, a little more 2000s than 1980s, but one can make allowances. All in all, it's recognisably Watchmen.
Only one surface negative - there are a couple of very ropey make-up jobs. Silk Spectre Snr's "old" face and Richard Nixon's big rubber nose and jowls are the two that really stand out. (Now watch some idiot awards ceremony give it Best Make-Up.)
There have been complaints from Watchmen fans that the ending was changed. Personally I feel it was changed for the better. The "squid" ending never felt entirely right to me, whereas I found the film ending a lot more coherent and a lot more satisfying. It all ties in more neatly. So an allegedly alien squid monster levels part of New York - what's that to the Russians? How's that going to affect the course of the Cold War? But a number of cities levelled worldwide, and apparently by America's big superweapon gone rogue - that not only involves other countries besides America, it also puts the burden on America (the only real military superpower even during the Cold War, as we discovered after the man behind the Iron Curtain showed us the rust that had glued his missiles into their silos) to apologise to the world, to be the first to step down and offer peace. As with Lord of the Rings, I think here we see how liberties taken by filmmakers can actually improve a story.
However, there were other liberties, even beyond the cuts and compressions needed to fit the story into a film of less than three hours. I'm talking here about gratuity.
At first it didn't seem as though anything was amiss. The opening scene, with the Comedian fighting for his life, didn't seem out of place. The Comedian's attempted rape of Silk Spectre Snr, if lingered over perhaps a little too long, was pretty much as in the book. The Viet Nam flashbacks were almost frame-for-frame matches for the graphic novel. If the fight scenes overall were more physical, more limb-breaky and nose-bloody than in the book, well, that's just cinema for you. It's easier to stomach violence in comic books, one carefully framed shot at a time, one more step removed from fluid reality. I was half prepared to dismiss my unease as mere preciousness on my part.
And then we saw someone cutting someone else's forearms off with a circular saw. Dammit, I thought, that definitely wasn't in the book. Careful reference to the book confirms that a number of events were gored up beyond reasonable need. Rorschach's confrontation with the child abductor is another one that springs to mind. (What other films has Zack Snyder directed? 300. I don't remember that being particularly over-gory, although I may have made allowances given the subject matter. What else? Dawn of the Dead. Ah yes, that could well explain it.)
But Zack doesn't just like gratuitous gore - he likes gratuitous sex as well. The scene where Dan/Nite Owl and Laurie/Silk Spectre Jnr, fired up by a late-night act of costumed heroism, make love aboard the NiteOwlMobile is a thing of subtlety and beauty in the book. In the film, it's frankly clinical. Or, as Stephen "Bob the Angry Flower" Notley very rightly says, "Where the book has taste and class and frailty, the movie has a porny fuck scene." In fact, go and read Stephen's review (about halfway down the page), for he has many just and accurate things to say about the film.
There's one change that I think stands for the film adaptation as a whole. It's not an especially gratuitous bit. It's the scene where, as Dan and Laurie try to break him out of prison, Rorschach holds them up so that he can go and do nasty (unseen) things to Big Figure in the gents' toilets. It's implicitly clear in the book that he forces Big Figure bodily down the lav and flushes on him - this is backed up by an innocent remark from Laurie about not wanting to dive head first into things, and a knowing reply from Rorschach. It's a moment of sick humour. In the film, the joke is lost and it's blood, not water, that flows out under the toilet door as they walk away. Red, viscous blood in Shining-esque quantities. As I say, this pretty much sums up for me what Zack Snyder has done here - sacrificed subtlety for the sake of being more in-your-face.
(This paragraph left intentionally blank for you to add your own pertinent thoughts about Dr Manhattan's enormous luminous blue wanger. See, even that had to be bigger and more graphic, didn't it? Tsk.)
So yes, it's an excellent film, both in itself and as a version of Watchmen. It's remained complex and thought-provoking, if less nuanced than the book. But it's just rather horrible in places. The story itself is horrible, philosophically speaking - an "end justifies the means" fable with no happy ending and no easy answers, although that in itself may serve as a comment on Alan Moore's true feelings about the "end justifies the means" worldview. But the book is a lot easier to stomach.
Let's see if I can pull a coherent review out of the assembled thoughts that follow. Ware ye big, floppy, luminous blue spoilers.
Positives first. This is unquestionably a very close adaptation of the graphic novel - we'll talk about the small changes in translation in a minute. Visually it's phenomenal, with the title sequence a particular triumph. Dan/Nite Owl's anxiety dream is another notable piece of work. The use of '80s songs to reinforce the story's setting is lovely, and even the incidental soundtrack sounds like something from an '80s film. Very nice indeed. The acting is generally good - I can't think of any glaringly bad performances. The costumes are, perhaps, in the case of the superheroes, a little more 2000s than 1980s, but one can make allowances. All in all, it's recognisably Watchmen.
Only one surface negative - there are a couple of very ropey make-up jobs. Silk Spectre Snr's "old" face and Richard Nixon's big rubber nose and jowls are the two that really stand out. (Now watch some idiot awards ceremony give it Best Make-Up.)
There have been complaints from Watchmen fans that the ending was changed. Personally I feel it was changed for the better. The "squid" ending never felt entirely right to me, whereas I found the film ending a lot more coherent and a lot more satisfying. It all ties in more neatly. So an allegedly alien squid monster levels part of New York - what's that to the Russians? How's that going to affect the course of the Cold War? But a number of cities levelled worldwide, and apparently by America's big superweapon gone rogue - that not only involves other countries besides America, it also puts the burden on America (the only real military superpower even during the Cold War, as we discovered after the man behind the Iron Curtain showed us the rust that had glued his missiles into their silos) to apologise to the world, to be the first to step down and offer peace. As with Lord of the Rings, I think here we see how liberties taken by filmmakers can actually improve a story.
However, there were other liberties, even beyond the cuts and compressions needed to fit the story into a film of less than three hours. I'm talking here about gratuity.
At first it didn't seem as though anything was amiss. The opening scene, with the Comedian fighting for his life, didn't seem out of place. The Comedian's attempted rape of Silk Spectre Snr, if lingered over perhaps a little too long, was pretty much as in the book. The Viet Nam flashbacks were almost frame-for-frame matches for the graphic novel. If the fight scenes overall were more physical, more limb-breaky and nose-bloody than in the book, well, that's just cinema for you. It's easier to stomach violence in comic books, one carefully framed shot at a time, one more step removed from fluid reality. I was half prepared to dismiss my unease as mere preciousness on my part.
And then we saw someone cutting someone else's forearms off with a circular saw. Dammit, I thought, that definitely wasn't in the book. Careful reference to the book confirms that a number of events were gored up beyond reasonable need. Rorschach's confrontation with the child abductor is another one that springs to mind. (What other films has Zack Snyder directed? 300. I don't remember that being particularly over-gory, although I may have made allowances given the subject matter. What else? Dawn of the Dead. Ah yes, that could well explain it.)
But Zack doesn't just like gratuitous gore - he likes gratuitous sex as well. The scene where Dan/Nite Owl and Laurie/Silk Spectre Jnr, fired up by a late-night act of costumed heroism, make love aboard the NiteOwlMobile is a thing of subtlety and beauty in the book. In the film, it's frankly clinical. Or, as Stephen "Bob the Angry Flower" Notley very rightly says, "Where the book has taste and class and frailty, the movie has a porny fuck scene." In fact, go and read Stephen's review (about halfway down the page), for he has many just and accurate things to say about the film.
There's one change that I think stands for the film adaptation as a whole. It's not an especially gratuitous bit. It's the scene where, as Dan and Laurie try to break him out of prison, Rorschach holds them up so that he can go and do nasty (unseen) things to Big Figure in the gents' toilets. It's implicitly clear in the book that he forces Big Figure bodily down the lav and flushes on him - this is backed up by an innocent remark from Laurie about not wanting to dive head first into things, and a knowing reply from Rorschach. It's a moment of sick humour. In the film, the joke is lost and it's blood, not water, that flows out under the toilet door as they walk away. Red, viscous blood in Shining-esque quantities. As I say, this pretty much sums up for me what Zack Snyder has done here - sacrificed subtlety for the sake of being more in-your-face.
(This paragraph left intentionally blank for you to add your own pertinent thoughts about Dr Manhattan's enormous luminous blue wanger. See, even that had to be bigger and more graphic, didn't it? Tsk.)
So yes, it's an excellent film, both in itself and as a version of Watchmen. It's remained complex and thought-provoking, if less nuanced than the book. But it's just rather horrible in places. The story itself is horrible, philosophically speaking - an "end justifies the means" fable with no happy ending and no easy answers, although that in itself may serve as a comment on Alan Moore's true feelings about the "end justifies the means" worldview. But the book is a lot easier to stomach.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Who watches the watchmen?
Who fires the firemen?
Who bins the binmen?
Who milks the milkmen?
Who walks the walkmen?
Who stays the stamen?
Who frenches the Frenchmen?
Who marks the marksmen?
Who airs the airmen?
Who heads the headsmen?
Who anchors the anchormen?
Who hies the hymen?
Who bonds the bondsmen?
Who moons the Moon-men?
Who cycles the cyclamen?
Who lays the laymen?
Who owes the omen?
Who sees the semen?
Well, Bill Clinton's dry cleaner, obviously. I'll get me coat...
Who bins the binmen?
Who milks the milkmen?
Who walks the walkmen?
Who stays the stamen?
Who frenches the Frenchmen?
Who marks the marksmen?
Who airs the airmen?
Who heads the headsmen?
Who anchors the anchormen?
Who hies the hymen?
Who bonds the bondsmen?
Who moons the Moon-men?
Who cycles the cyclamen?
Who lays the laymen?
Who owes the omen?
Who sees the semen?
Well, Bill Clinton's dry cleaner, obviously. I'll get me coat...
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Scary monsters (and super creeps)
Well, thank the low ratings that Demons is finished. We missed the middle of the series but tuned in for the final episode, just so that I could see how accurately I'd predicted its plot based solely on the first episode. Not too far off, as it turned out. Grief, but this really was a shabby series, though. Forty minutes of what I assume was supposed to be character interaction from the Scrappy Gang (as I like to call them), at the end of which that week's monster is burst like an only mildly quirky balloon. Pop, episode over, abandon plot.
Other thoughts. Weird that Philip Glenister should display not one but two dodgy American accents in the finale, and it appeared he was putting the second one on in an effort to deceive someone who'd never met him before and wouldn't know what he sounded like anyway. Also slightly regrettable was all the "thee-ing" - "smite thee" was bad enough, but when Glenister said he would "surely rend thee", my first thought was "...in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't", and my second thought was that perhaps the accent had gone really wrong and he'd actually been trying for Yorkshireman all this time.
Heigh-ho. Pretty much everything else that needs to be said about Demons is summed up here:
Meanwhile we've had Being Human on BBC3, of all places. It's been the TV equivalent of one of those Star Trek episodes where everybody's evil twin turns up wearing a beard: BBC and ITV, both showing a series about monsters hiding among humans in the modern world, and one of them's simplistic, flat, formulaic shit and the other one's engaging, complex and witty. Being Human did have a bit of a mid-series lull where it seemed to be marking time, and Russell Tovey's acting has been a bit variable, but the penultimate episode was phenomenal, and I've heard good things about the final episode. Sadly won't get to actually see it until the Friday repeat, owing to the way BBC3 repeat it every other night at 1am, silly people.
Appropriately the news broke on the same day that Being Human would be brought back for a second series and Demons wouldn't, which just reinforces the idea that they're parallel universe twins.
Other thoughts. Weird that Philip Glenister should display not one but two dodgy American accents in the finale, and it appeared he was putting the second one on in an effort to deceive someone who'd never met him before and wouldn't know what he sounded like anyway. Also slightly regrettable was all the "thee-ing" - "smite thee" was bad enough, but when Glenister said he would "surely rend thee", my first thought was "...in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't", and my second thought was that perhaps the accent had gone really wrong and he'd actually been trying for Yorkshireman all this time.
Heigh-ho. Pretty much everything else that needs to be said about Demons is summed up here:
Meanwhile we've had Being Human on BBC3, of all places. It's been the TV equivalent of one of those Star Trek episodes where everybody's evil twin turns up wearing a beard: BBC and ITV, both showing a series about monsters hiding among humans in the modern world, and one of them's simplistic, flat, formulaic shit and the other one's engaging, complex and witty. Being Human did have a bit of a mid-series lull where it seemed to be marking time, and Russell Tovey's acting has been a bit variable, but the penultimate episode was phenomenal, and I've heard good things about the final episode. Sadly won't get to actually see it until the Friday repeat, owing to the way BBC3 repeat it every other night at 1am, silly people.
Appropriately the news broke on the same day that Being Human would be brought back for a second series and Demons wouldn't, which just reinforces the idea that they're parallel universe twins.
Books read in February
The rest of Air, Geoff Ryman
A multiple-award-winning and wonderful novel about a huge technological advance - the Internet delivered telepathically right into your head! - and its affect on a mountainside community in a small developing country. The book's strengths lie in examining the clash between a non-Western worldview and technology that's geared entirely towards a Western worldview - and that's then rolled out globally, whether you want it or not, whether you can relate to it or not - and in the rounded characters. There's also the occasional spot of magic realism, which is a bit of an odd fit with the generally down-to-earth tone of the book, but not unwelcome. Four awards well won, I think.
It's all been short stories after that. Short stories for a short month.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Stephen King
Of King's novels, I've only read a few but have somehow managed to span the range from good (The Shining) to laughable (Cujo et al). However, I'd completely neglected his short stories until now. These, too, cover the full range of quality, but are generally short enough that you don't feel you've wasted your time getting to the next good one. (I say "generally", because what King considers to be typical short story length is what I think most people would consider to be novella length. Enough said about the length of his novels.) I feel I can now give his longer work another try.
Zima Blue and other stories, Alastair Reynolds
If you want an anthology of the short stories that are set in the same universe as Reynolds' Revelation Space series of novels, you can easily pick it up in your nearest bookshop; but if you want this anthology of his stand-alone short stories, you have to mail order it from a small press (until next year, anyway). I understand this is because of the promise Reynolds had made to the small press owner some years previously, but to the casual observer it might seem a strange state of affairs. Heigh-ho. I haven't read the other anthology so can't compare, but this is a collection of sturdy, well-written space opera pieces. And Reynolds can do horror too - one of the stories leaves you with the image of Elton John as the last human being... brr...
The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford
Mmm, ice cream. I certainly do love Ford's novels, but didn't entirely get on with his previous anthology, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant. This one, so to speak, is a different story, with several stand-out pieces. Magic realism and embroidered childhood reminiscences are the order of the day. The longest piece in the book bears an uncanny resemblance to the plot synopsis of his latest novel, but until I get my hands on that I can't know for sure if it's the same story extended. I wouldn't mind if it is. "The Weight of Words" deserves a special mention, and now ranks among my favourite short stories.
Species of Spaces and other pieces, Georges Perec (trans John Sturrock)
Yes, in English. Wordplay is one of the hardest things to convey in translation, but at least with Perec it seems that people are prepared to try, and succeed. And my ability and patience with reading French aren't what they once were. These are essays rather than short stories (although there are a few fictional items as well), covering Perec's thoughts on such topics as why we should pay more attention to the everyday details of the world around us, the nature of memory, how fashion could be made more interesting, and why he feels Robert Antelme's Holocaust memoir is better than any other (bringing us back to the beginning, it's largely because it focuses on the everyday details that other memoirs neglected in favour of the big shocks). Some very nice pieces in here.
Edit: I forgot to mention one glaring oversight, the failure to include "Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano", a mock scientific paper on the "yelling reaction" produced by pelting opera singers with tomatoes. But thankfully this one's online, so no one need miss out.
All but one story in The Birthday of the World, Ursula le Guin
And by the time you read this I should have finished off that last one as well. My literary diet doesn't include a lot of what people like to call feminist SF. This isn't a conscious choice on my part, it's just kind of happened that way. I just pick up the books that look interesting to me. Now at last I've read something by le Guin, and intend to read more. The stories in this book are all fascinating, well worked-out studies of hypothetical societies in which (perhaps only slight) differences in social circumstances from the ones we're used to lead to profound differences in sexuality, and vice versa. Something of a contrast with, say, Larry Niven's space opera concept of "rithshathra", in which anyone with a set of genitals will pretty much try it on with anyone else of any other species with a set of genitals until they find a combination that occasions an amusing cartoon.
Next month, novels again.
A multiple-award-winning and wonderful novel about a huge technological advance - the Internet delivered telepathically right into your head! - and its affect on a mountainside community in a small developing country. The book's strengths lie in examining the clash between a non-Western worldview and technology that's geared entirely towards a Western worldview - and that's then rolled out globally, whether you want it or not, whether you can relate to it or not - and in the rounded characters. There's also the occasional spot of magic realism, which is a bit of an odd fit with the generally down-to-earth tone of the book, but not unwelcome. Four awards well won, I think.
It's all been short stories after that. Short stories for a short month.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Stephen King
Of King's novels, I've only read a few but have somehow managed to span the range from good (The Shining) to laughable (Cujo et al). However, I'd completely neglected his short stories until now. These, too, cover the full range of quality, but are generally short enough that you don't feel you've wasted your time getting to the next good one. (I say "generally", because what King considers to be typical short story length is what I think most people would consider to be novella length. Enough said about the length of his novels.) I feel I can now give his longer work another try.
Zima Blue and other stories, Alastair Reynolds
If you want an anthology of the short stories that are set in the same universe as Reynolds' Revelation Space series of novels, you can easily pick it up in your nearest bookshop; but if you want this anthology of his stand-alone short stories, you have to mail order it from a small press (until next year, anyway). I understand this is because of the promise Reynolds had made to the small press owner some years previously, but to the casual observer it might seem a strange state of affairs. Heigh-ho. I haven't read the other anthology so can't compare, but this is a collection of sturdy, well-written space opera pieces. And Reynolds can do horror too - one of the stories leaves you with the image of Elton John as the last human being... brr...
The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford
Mmm, ice cream. I certainly do love Ford's novels, but didn't entirely get on with his previous anthology, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant. This one, so to speak, is a different story, with several stand-out pieces. Magic realism and embroidered childhood reminiscences are the order of the day. The longest piece in the book bears an uncanny resemblance to the plot synopsis of his latest novel, but until I get my hands on that I can't know for sure if it's the same story extended. I wouldn't mind if it is. "The Weight of Words" deserves a special mention, and now ranks among my favourite short stories.
Species of Spaces and other pieces, Georges Perec (trans John Sturrock)
Yes, in English. Wordplay is one of the hardest things to convey in translation, but at least with Perec it seems that people are prepared to try, and succeed. And my ability and patience with reading French aren't what they once were. These are essays rather than short stories (although there are a few fictional items as well), covering Perec's thoughts on such topics as why we should pay more attention to the everyday details of the world around us, the nature of memory, how fashion could be made more interesting, and why he feels Robert Antelme's Holocaust memoir is better than any other (bringing us back to the beginning, it's largely because it focuses on the everyday details that other memoirs neglected in favour of the big shocks). Some very nice pieces in here.
Edit: I forgot to mention one glaring oversight, the failure to include "Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano", a mock scientific paper on the "yelling reaction" produced by pelting opera singers with tomatoes. But thankfully this one's online, so no one need miss out.
All but one story in The Birthday of the World, Ursula le Guin
And by the time you read this I should have finished off that last one as well. My literary diet doesn't include a lot of what people like to call feminist SF. This isn't a conscious choice on my part, it's just kind of happened that way. I just pick up the books that look interesting to me. Now at last I've read something by le Guin, and intend to read more. The stories in this book are all fascinating, well worked-out studies of hypothetical societies in which (perhaps only slight) differences in social circumstances from the ones we're used to lead to profound differences in sexuality, and vice versa. Something of a contrast with, say, Larry Niven's space opera concept of "rithshathra", in which anyone with a set of genitals will pretty much try it on with anyone else of any other species with a set of genitals until they find a combination that occasions an amusing cartoon.
Next month, novels again.
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