What I'm Reading

As always, these are just the books I'm currently reading which I like a lot -- you may assume the presence of several (even possibly several dozen, since I don't usually finish books that bore me) books I read that are not on this page, for some reason or the other.  These might be books that made me go meh.  They might be books I found annoying or silly.

Books I find actively horrid or harmful I will often blog about, OTOH!

A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz.

This is the book I am currently reading, and I do recommend it, though with reservations.

The plus: Deresiewicsz provides a readable, engaging text, and it is filled with genuine insight about Austen and her novels.  If you are an Austen fan (as I am) you will find this book a wonderful and worthwhile romp.

My own favorite chapters are those on Mansfield Park and Persuasion, no doubt because those are my two favorite Austen novels; yet the opening chapter, in which Deresiewicsz recounts his own reading of Emma, and how it taught him to read Austen -- or rather, how Austen's brilliance taught him to read the world in a new and better way -- is as deftly constructed as a detective story.

So, you know, so much fun.

And yet.  And this isn't even a big problem.  You can get past it.  But holy hell, the sexism.

You'll be glad to know, for instance, that Jane Austen can play with the big boys.  That she's worth reading, even if she's a woman.  That her style -- girly though it is -- is "every bit" as good as anything the men write.

Some of this is probably exaggeration for effect.  Let's hope.  Nevertheless, it does grate on the nerves.  And I could have done with hella less of it.


Mars Evacuees, Sophia McDougall

This is a middle-grade SF novel, which as long-time readers of the blog know is not a problem for me.  That is, I read books at every level, from picture books aimed at pre-school kids, up through grade school books -- Hilary McKay's books are among my favorite, not just kids' books, but books of all kinds -- and on through Very Serious Books Indeed, Middlemarch being one of the books on my Top Ten list.  (Well -- top 20 list?  Top 50 list?  Who can narrow it down to ten?  Seriously?)

Anyway!  Mars Evacuees, aimed at middle-grade readers, is a romp, more than a Very Serious Book Indeed, though it has its serious bits.  Its main character, Alice Dare, is caught up in a long-term war, between Earth and alien invaders who have taken over the planet after fleeing their own set of alien invaders.  As the book opens, Alice and several hundred other children are being evacuated to Mars, to be trained as the next generation of soldiers to fight the alien invaders.  Alice doesn't especially want to be a soldier, but is realistic enough to know she doesn't have much choice.

Plenty of good details in this (somewhat) episodic novel, which really took off for me when Alice and her friends met up with one of the alien invaders, lost in Mar's outback.  (No spoilers, but very cool.)

Saga, Brian Vaughn and Fiona Stapes, Book 4.

Also very episodic, as it would have to be.  It's a graphic novel.  We're well into episodes.

This has beautiful art, and great characters -- I think The Will might be my favorite, though who knows, it's hard to choose, Izabel (the adolescent ghost who is only half a girl, due to being killed by a landmine in the planet's war) is great, and you gotta love Sophie, and Lying Cat -- who can't love Lying Cat?



Not much advances in the plot in this episode of the book, but nevertheless we have a lot of fun.  And I am always willing to spend time with these characters.

This is Book 4.  If you haven't read Books 1-3, what are you waiting for?


Old Venus, Ed. George R.R. Martin, Garder Dozois

TBH, as the kids say, I only bought this one because it had a story by Eleanor Arnason in it.

Still, well worth the ticket, if only for the Arnason story, which -- as you can count on when Arnason is writing the story -- is wonderful.

The conceit of this anthology seems to be that we re-imagine a Golden Age Venus, from SF of the 1930-1960s, before we knew what Venus was actually like.  The writers have found various ways of doing this.  Arnason postulates an alternative history, and includes -- as she did in her Women of the Iron People -- a (slightly) more successful Soviet Russia to go along with it.  The tension between Capitalist and Communist ideology playing out in the company towns of Venus gives force to Arnason's story, "Ruins."

The story also features the group of characters which is her forte -- Arnason does this multi-character story really well.  My favorite character here is probably the baby pterosaur, named Baby (really a pseudorhamphorhynchus, though he disputes the pseudo bit); though Arkady is a close second.  And who could not also love Maggie, our Autonomous Leica?

Other stories I liked a lot in the book include Tobias Bucknell's "Pale Blue Memories," about why you can't just start a slave revolt or run off from slavery (I am probably not wrong in reading a reference to Heinlein's "Logic of Empire" here); Gwyneth Jones' "A Planet Called Desire"; and (mostly for its ending) Joe Haldeman's "Living Hell."


Terry Pratchett, Thud. 

“Vines had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him.  It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could’ve been a republic in a dozen moves.”

Right now I am just reading a lot of Terry Pratchett, that's all.

(O wailey, wailey, wailey.)

Edited to add: Here's Sir Terry with his famous sword, the one he forged from a meteorite.  (Photograph by Adrian Sherratt/Rex Features.)

Thinking About the Revolution

I've read two books in the past two days, Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett.


Both were cracking good reads, by which I mean they kept me up until late at night, turning pages. Both I had read before -- Mote, not since I was a kid, Night Watch last year sometime, when I first discovered Pratchett. Night Watch is much more to my taste politically. Mote is somewhat to the right of my politics.


But as I lay in bed last night (or rather, very early this morning, given that I am suffering from the worst insomnia in my adult life, and am hitting the pillow somewhere around five a.m. these days) considering the differences between the two texts, and why one of them annoyed me so much, while the other appealed to me so strongly, well, it really was not just that one is more leftist and the other is hard right military POV.

Because it's not -- Pratchett has a bit of the practical military POV mixed in with his populist-Leftism, and I'm not bothered by that.


And clearly I am bothered deeply by Niven & Pournelle's ridiculous ideas of a women's place in the world -- and while what they do with the alien Moties sex-change and so on is interesting, it does nothing to negate their insistence that "real" people (by which they mean European-ancestry White Guys) will keep their women at home after marriage, doing the child-raising.



No, here is what bothers me most about the Niven & Pournelle worldview: its insistence that the correct attitude of the citizen toward his leaders is respectful trust. (I do choose that pronoun carefully. Only men are actually people in N&P's world, despite his tossing in of a token woman character.) It is assumed -- and then demonstrated -- in the N&P world that those in command, those who are born to command, and given command, know what they are doing, and having taken command, will do the right thing.


It is assumed, and then demonstrated in the text, that those who object to the actions of leaders -- rebels, outies -- are bad people, who deserve to die, who deserve whatever punishment, up to having their entire planet reduced to radioactive glass, is visited upon them: they deserve this simply for having questioned authority.


Since the story is told from the point of view of one of those in authority, Rod (yes, this is his name, nothing phallic here, move along) Blaine, who is written as an earnest hero type who works very hard to get everything right and worries about getting everything right, the reader is reassured that those in authority are Really Good Guys who Really Want To DO Right by those in their purview.


We're not meant to look at the way Sally (his wife) is stripped of her power ("Rod won't let me think about the Institute after the wedding.") or how everyone with any power is a European white guy or how the decisions are made by fiat behind the scenes by the few white guys with all the power -- oh yes, benevolently, and we are TOLD these guys know best, and since those guys have been written as so noble and brave and intelligent, not like the wicked outies, well, it must be true, yes?


This is the worldview of the conservative, who believes -- I guess -- that, so long as he is the right man, the big man in charge can be trusted; and that everyone in the empire will be happy serfs who will be happy to serve, so long as the big man tells them what to do, except for a few idiots, who can be happily shot, or shot down with cool logic. (One scene that made me dizzy with disbelief early in the book was when the parliament -- I guess it was parliament -- met on New Scotland, and everyone in the parliament "pledges allegiance" to a hologram of the emperor, and then bows to it. I guess N&P think this is realistic. I guess they think grown-up people would actually do this. And, since I can see Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and her ilk actually doing it, I suppose they aren't exactly wrong.)


Contrast this with Pratchett's worldview in Night Watch, which strikes me as much more realistic and adult.


For one thing, the leaders are mostly idiots, or crazy. (Which, watching our own Congress, Q.E.D.) The few who actually know what they are doing and actually intend to do what is best for the land under their purview know better than to expect the people to follow them from blind loyalty. Most people, as Pratchett well knows, are mostly interested mainly in their own lives and what is going to affect them. Who has time for more that that, mostly? Maybe five or six percent of us, tops. And even then, only part time.

"Do the job that is put before you," Sam Vimes says in Night Watch: that's what most of us do, and it's what Vimes, who is one of Pratchett's best leaders, and best heroes, mostly does. Vetinari, Pratchett's other best leader, and other best hero, though a more ambiguous one, also appears in this book, at the very beginning of his career. Vetinari is Practchett's demonstration for why we should and should not trust our leaders -- he is a tyrant, the all-powerful, brilliant, wily ruler of Ankh-Morpork, not exactly benevolent, though he may well have, ultimately, benevolent ends.


Still, Sam Vimes does not trust him; Sam Vimes is always wary of him, and always acts to keep him in check. Sam Vimes, at one point, arrests him, because no one should be above the law. In this book, Night Watch, when the leaders of the city are entirely powerful, Sam Vimes (under the name John Keel) leads a revolution: moving the barriacades, bit by bit, so that, daily, more of the city is under control of the law, and less and less is under the control of whim and tyranny.


Niven and Pournelle's worldview, it came to me, as I was lying sleepless last night -- that is exactly what they want. When you want the government to be under the control of some powerful man who you are forced to trust to be benevolent and good, what you are trusting in is whim and tyranny. Sam Vimes/Terry Pratchett's worldview -- where we do not trust, but hedge the rulers around with laws and rules, and then, warily, warily, keep the rulers at heel with those laws and rules -- that worldview puts the government under our control. Perhaps it means the government is less able to act; it also means the government is less able to put its boot on our throats.

I suppose it all depends on what you want from a government: death to the rebels, or people who are free to quarrel in the streets if they damn well feel like it.