lizbee | Recent Entries

Paramount dropped four new posters to promote Disco's fifth and final (sob) season, and I love them so much, it was suddenly 2008 and I had to make DW icons, if only because it's shocking that I don't already have a Captain Burnham icon.

(The problem with 100x100 icons these days is that screens are so large and the icons are so small.)

Anyway, I just threw these into Canva and moved them around, so feel free to make other changes if your heart desires.

I read 14 books in February, of which Arkhangelsk was by far the stand out. A friend recommended it last year, and it was only AU$4 in the Kindle store, so it has been sitting on my iPad for months, waiting for a day when I had no library books to read.

And it was worth the wait -- and worth far more than AU$4.

Here's the premise:

The city of Novayarkha, situated beneath the surface of a barely habitable planet, is home to the last remnants of humanity -- aside from the Exiles, who split from the main group shortly after the colony was established, and who exist primarily as boogeymen and occasional raiders for the (literally) sheltered people of the city. Anya, the chief of police, is conducting an investigation into a missing woman -- the latest in a series of disappearances, primarily of young women of childbearing age. She's dealing with politics, an over-eager deputy, her grief over her own lost child. But her life is orderly. Predictable. As safe as a life on a hostile world can be.

And then. A ship turns up in orbit. A generation ship from Earth, which was alive and well as of 40 years ago, and its crew had no idea they were going to stumble across the descendants of a long-lost generation ship ... that was stolen and launched by a group that might have been dissidents or escaped criminals or a cult.

My elevator pitch for Arkhangelsk is, imagine if Lois McMaster Bujold wrote Wool, and it was a low-key borderline asexual f/f romance. The Vorkosigan vibes were POWERFUL:

both Anya and Maddy, the captain of the generation ship, are women over 40
so is Anya's boss, the governor of the colony
a lost colony populated by the descendants of Russians
with a bit of a radiation problem
everyone is very concerned with procreation, which is managed via both natural and external gestation

But there's also the Wool/Silo vibes of a subterranean society with SECRETS, lost history and old artefacts, hostile terrain outside and some pretty horrifying acts committed in the name of its justice system.

I read this in two days, not because it was a slim book, but because I couldn't put it down. And I suspect it will reward rereading, because once you know the full truth of the founding of Novayarkha, some of the early stuff will hit very differently.

There's an ambiguity about Anya and Maddy's relationship by the end that I really enjoyed: there is an intimacy and love between them, but whether that is sexual -- or even overtly romantic -- is not explored. (Each considers herself too tired to have a sex life, which is a whole mood.) I think readers seeking an overt romance will be disappointed and annoyed, but I really enjoyed the journey we got.

Bonesteel has another series, a conventional-looking military space opera with a female lead, and you can bet I'm going to give those books a red hot go.

Current Mood: thoughtful

OKAY SO. Last year

skygiants posted about the Mirror Visitor quartet, a set of four (obvs) French YA fantasy novels about an arranged marriage between a young woman whose superpowers are reading the history of objects with her fingers and travelling through mirrors, and a man whose superpower is his complete lack of charisma. (Also he has perfect recall and can psychically extend his nervous system to cause other people pain, but mostly he is known for his awful personality. I love him.)

Naturally I was intrigued, even though I hate the French, so I put a hold on the first book at the library. It came in last month, followed quickly by the rest of the quartet, and I finished book 4 yesterday.

I loved it, I'm low-key obsessed with it, I do not think the ending worked, and it failed in a way I completely understand. For, you see, when Noted Australian YA Author Lili Wilkinson read my manuscript late in 2022, she was like, "This is great, but the end falls apart because you have one conspiracy too many and you're introducing all these new elements and characters which could be a whole separate novel in their own right. You need to simplify."

Everyone needs a Lili Wilkinson in their life, but maybe especially Christelle Dabos. Book 1 and 2 are perfect. Book 3 takes us into a whole new setting, introduces new characters and new mysteries, and it's ... quite good.

(I figured it would go something like this; ALSO Dreamwidth's image hosting is bad and should feel bad.)

Book 4 needed to bring all those elements together into a cohesive whole, and I don't think it worked. The characters we fell in love with in the first two books are sidelined, an extremely important new character from book 3 is all but gone in book 4, and one minor supporting character from book 3 is revealed to be extremely important after all, but in a way that made me go, "Wait, what?"

ALSO and most unforgivably, in my opinion, having taken three whole books for Ophelia and Thorn to reach a rapprochement, they're once again separated for most of book 4, and ( (spoilers for the end) )

I don't hate the ending, and I don't regret investing this much time and energy into the books -- Dabos does some especially cool stuff with disability, which almost makes up for the relentless and tedious heterosexuality -- but I'm not inclined to go out and buy the whole quartet in paperback, the way I was a few weeks ago. Though I will say, I think it may reward rereading at some future time.

(I also have a lot of beef with the translator, who keeps using words like "oriental" and "retard" in ways which are technically correct but also completely oblivious to the fact that these words are no longer acceptable in English. If not for the extremely canny metaphor for what is currently called AI, I'd wonder if these books hadn't fallen through a portal from the 1960s.)

Current Mood: annoyed

I read 18 books in January.

That may sound impressive, but the truth is, there came a point around book 10 where I was like, "Am I really taking the time to appreciate these books, or am I just choosing quantity over quality so my spreadsheet and reading journal look good?"

(I decided to use both methods to track my reading and have no regrets.)

Then I read another eight books.

Two were graphic novels and three were middle grade, so on the shorter side, but honestly? I just had a lot of time. Like, I was back at "work" from the 15th, but there wasn't much to do, so I read.

Anyway, highlights:

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Historical horror about a haunted reform school in the Jim Crow era south. The ghosts are less scary than the racism.

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyoon Sook and Ryan Estrada

Late middle grade/early YA graphic novel about political repression and the ensuing activism in 1980s South Korea. Banned in some US states because opposing a far right regime sets a bad example for the kids, I guess. I think this is particularly valuable because a lot of young people consume contemporary Korean pop culture but may not be aware of the relatively recent history of the country, and the way its citizens fought for their democracy.

She Is A Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

YA horror novel about colonialism, family and a house that eats people. This is one of those books where I go, "This is good, but I'm not sure it's for me." Mainly because horror is generally not my jam, and it turns out horror with insects is specifically not my jam.

Ink Girls by Marieke Nijkamp and Sylvia Bi

Middle grade graphic novel about freedom of the press in fantasy-Renaissance-Italy-with-no-magic. (There's a word for secondary world fantasy without magic, isn't there? We did a whole panel on the genre at Continuum once! I'm drawing a total blank.)

Anyway, I loved this story and briefly indulged in the revision equivalent of cutting your own fringe: asking myself, should I rewrite my middle grade novel as a graphic novel? (I would love to write a graphic novel and really ought to start looking for classes in how to do that.) I also liked the art, which is incredibly colourful and lively, but I also found it a little hard to follow. I'm going to look out for the hardcopy, because I suspect the problem is the size of my iPad Mini's screen.

I also read the first three books of the Mirror Visitor quartet by Christelle Dabos, but I'm waiting for book 4 to come in from the library before I rave about those. (Only my very strict budget has kept me from just dropping everything and buying it in paperback. Well, also it turns out those books are MASSIVE. I've been inhaling them all in a single day, just wandering around the house, cooking meals, with one eye on my iPad at all times. So I thought they were quite slim!)

Why did I read a 900-page potboiler from 1948? THERE'S BACKSTORY, OKAY So first of all, my flatmate and I were interested in watching Masters of the Air on AppleTV at the end of the month, but we were like, "Well, first we need watch Band of Brothers and The Pacific." I know some of you are in War Fandom and these are your canons, and I totally get the appeal of BoB, that was great. Like, it took a while, but eventually I could tell most of the men apart, and in any case, each episode had a clear narrative arc.

The Pacific. Was bad. The only men I could identify at any moment were Rami Malek and Australia's DILF Gary Sweet, so it was a whole lot of interchangeable men in khaki dodging explosions and shouting racial slurs. I mean, seriously, the Nazis in BoB were humanised more than the Japanese.

But I was looking forward to episode 3, "Melbourne", because it was filmed in the city almost the week I moved down here, and I remember marveling at the reproduction of wartime streets. And I was pretty sure there would be women in it. It would be a fun time!

I was wrong. There were women, and there were quite a lot of sex scenes, but it was ahistorical to an annoying degree, and the women were not people.

But this reminded me that I've never read Come In Spinner, held up as the book about the Australian homefront in WW2 from women's perspective. There was a bright, pastel-coloured, hairspray scented miniseries in 1988, which always put me off reading it because it looked so fluffy, but the latest edition was pastel-free and I figured, why not?

My friends. This book is talked about like it's a "women's novel" (nothing wrong with that, but there are implications of romantic tragedy, like a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis movie of the era). It's definitely a novel by and about women, but it's better described as "socialist melodrama", which is definitely not a genre I just made up. You've got your various romances and relationships, but ALSO every chapter sees someone give a speech about workplace rights, capitalist exploitation, housing shortages, women's rights, abortion rights and more. (If it's one of the villainous characters, they're calling for strikers to be shot, or blaming the housing shortage on foreigners -- because Australia has not learned a thing since the 1940s -- or proposing that African Americans be rounded up and put in KKK concentration camps after the war. Only they don't say "African Americans".)

I mean. It's absolutely a potboiler, I read all 900 pages in two days. Couldn't put it down, and have a lot of feelings about all the characters and the ways they're affected by the war and the patriarchy, and the lingering trauma of the Depression. One character's teenage sister runs away from home, falls into the hands of human traffickers and winds up in a brothel; another sister becomes pregnant to a married soldier, has an illegal abortion and dies. The only woman with any real autonomy is Dr Dallas McIntyre, a school teacher turned doctor, and even she remarks that she cannot legally have children without giving up her career and independence to marry. (Phryne Fisher fans will recognise Dr McIntyre -- Kerry Greenwood lifted her wholesale for the first book in that series, and then she became a regular in the TV adaptation, although Dr Dallas is enthusiastically heterosexual.)

It was a thoroughly good read; I completely understand why it was heavily edited when first published (and still created controversy) -- I'm very glad that James was able to reconstruct the original draft in the '80s, because I think it would have been a lot less substantial without the uglier plotlines. (I saw one GoodReads review complaining that an abortion is more scandalous and has more consequences than a sixteen-year-old girl being found in a brothel, and yes, I do believe that was the whole point.)

2021 reading round-up
2022 reading round-up

So first of all, after two consecutive years of reading exactly 95 books, this year I cracked 100. Yes, one of them was a four-issue Star Trek comic that took me all of 20 minutes to read. That's not the point.

This year I imported my Google spreadsheet into Notion, a planner/productivity app I mainly use for keeping to-do lists. This was a mistake, mainly because Notion's spreadsheeting functionality is not amazing. For 2024 I've gone fully old-school with a paper reading journal, which is probably going to be very annoying come the end of the year when I'm doing this round-up...

Anyway. The stats.

Total books logged: 100
DNFs: 3 (all abandoned at more than 60%, so I didn't take them out of my list)

By target audience (age)

Adult - 78
Young Adult - 17
Middle Grade - 7

And my favourite category, by genre and audience

Contemporary (adult): 3
Contemporary (YA): 2
Contemporary (middle grade): 4

All the middle grade contemps were graphic novels -- America has really exciting stuff happening in that space, especially from diverse authors. I hope Australia is following suit, and I would pay money to attend some sort of "how to write a graphic novel script" course.

Both YA contemps were from Latina authors -- that Queens Public Library membership paid off.

Fantasy: (adult): 5
Fantasy (YA): 7
Fantasy (middle grade): 2

I read 12 different fantasy authors this year, and ten are friends, friends-of-friends or people with whom I am loosely acquainted.

Historical fiction (that isn't historical mystery)

Adult: 3
YA: 3
MG: 0

I'm gonna be honest. I like my historicals best when there's a crime happening.

Historical mystery

Adult: 18
YA: 1
MG: 0

The standout genre of the year, mainly thanks to my Barbara Hambly reread, but also my attempt at Steven Saylor, and also I read an early Andrew Taylor.

I'm gonna be honest: I watched Interview with the Vampire and hated it quite a lot, but it really made me want to start another Hambly re-read. So far I am resisting the urge.

Contemporary mystery

Adult: 4
YA: 1
MG: 0

The standout was the sole YA entry, The Black Queen by Jumata Emil.

I don't dislike contemporary crime fiction, but my overall feeling is that historical mysteries tell us something about a society, and a contemporary story can do that, but it's a lot harder.

I also read two contemporary thrillers (which I see as a genre which overlaps with mystery but has different narrative priorities). They were both enjoyable but not life-changing. Which is, in fairness, a lot to ask of a novel.

Science fiction

Adult: 9
YA: 0
MG: 0

Not a big year for SF, and most of it was a Murderbot reread. (I love those books, but man, it was a bold and interesting choice by Tor to release them without editing. Please don't tell me there was an editor involved, that would be very upsetting to hear.)

Non-fiction: 24

Okay, maybe this was the year of non-fiction. Mostly but not entirely histories, a couple of biographies. Largely American. I'm going to make an effort to read more Australian non-fiction in 2024, but I am braced for disappointment.

Author stats

Australian authors: 24% (down from 26% last year, but not a massive swing)
Authors of colour: 29% (a steady improvement from last year's 24%, but we can still do better)
Women: 62% (slightly down from last year, but I read more works by Men of Colour than in previous years so I'm not mad about it)
Non-binary authors: 2% (doubling last year's total...)

The really nerdy stats

Rereads: 18
Library loans: 50
Ebooks: 75

Library books are well up on last year, which is great -- I justified the US$50 it cost to join the Queens Public Library by saying I'd buy fewer book, and I guess it worked out!

TV stats

In my last round-up, I said I was going to create a similar spreadsheet for TV tracking. I did that, but only recently realised I should have tracked number of episodes watched, so I could go, "Oh yes, I've watched X number of TV shows this year."

Suffice to say I've watched 46 complete seasons of TV this year, including eight full-length seasons of 20 episodes or more. Most were in English; one each were in French and German. Most were American, a significant proportion were British, and only three were Australian. Shout out to my one Canadian series. I DNFd a handful, but the only one that stands out was Deadloch, which wasn't bad, but I sometimes deal with Northern Territory police brutality matters at work, so a comedy about a hilariously incompetent NT cop wasn't ever going to work for me.

I knew it -- the second I declared I was done with books by men for 2023, I had two library holds come in.

Magpie Wing by Max Easton is an Australian literary novel about sports, class, arts and suburban snobbery. Like most Australian literary novels, it reads more like a detailed outline than a completed work, I assume because that's all the author had time for before the grant money ran out. And like most Australian literary novels, it left me with a strong sense that life is devoid of purpose or beauty, and artistic pursuits are pointless.

I actually didn't hate Magpie Wing, but I hate what it represents about the Australian literary scene. But I will give it this: as an historical novel about a young man from a working class background with literary aspirations, it is doomed to be compared with Boy Swallows Universe, and it is far, far superior to Dalton's racist poverty porn (TV adaptation coming soon to a streaming service near you).

Lone Women by Victor LaValle is a horror novel, but I didn't know that when I put a hold on it. I must have skimmed the review I saw, because I had this idea that the "horror" came from the heroine being a Black woman homesteading alone in Montana, not an actual monster. And I was well and truly sucked in before I realised, and then I couldn't stop, sooooooo I guess I read a horror novel.

Truth be told, it wasn't all that scary, or even especially tense. I suspect this is what people deride as "cosy horror", but it was exactly what I didn't know I needed.

Someone on here recommended S. A. Crosby's second and third books, but the library didn't have those available, so I just got his first, My Darkest Prayer. It was a perfectly cromulent work of southern noir, and I can absolutely see the seeds of his current reputation as a great crime writer. I did not throw my iPad across the room when the hero (who looks like Dwayne Johnson) has sex with an award-winning adult film star. iPads are expensive. I just put it down and stared into space for a few minutes, marvelling that some of us come up with Mary Sue Litmus Tests and warnings about wish-fulfillment characters, and others...

THEN I was watching season 4 of Das Boot (highly recommended, it's a really good series, comes with ALL the trigger warnings) and found myself wanting more media about Sad Germans Enduring Totalitarianism, but ideally without Nazis. The library recommended the works of David Young, an Englishman writing police procedurals set in 1970s East Germany. I was like, "I'd rather read something by a German," but the first book in the series was available, I was like, "It's Libby, it's free, whatever."

So, Stasi Child, the first book. It was fine, I gave it three stars. Extremely coincidence-driven in the final act, and the writing was ... not great. Lots of "he sobbed" and "she screamed" where I would have conveyed mood and tone differently.

There's a whole thing about how the heroine was raped by her teacher at the police college, leading to a pregnancy (of twins!) which she aborted, and I was ... unconvinced that a true believer in socialism like this character would be so cut up about the abortion, as opposed to the rape. But okay.

The second book was available, I grabbed it.

My friends. It was bad.

I mean, the plot involves a hunt for abducted twin babies, because it turns out that East Germany is absolutely crawling with twins. The heroine also hooks up with a new man and, after having been told for years that the abortion left her infertile, she's ... pregnant! With twins! (Meanwhile, we get chapters from the POV of a red herring in the twinnapping, who worked as a nurse assisting an abortionist, and as someone who grew up with a lot of pro-life propaganda around the house, I could tell where the author got his research. Like, I could tell you which video he watched. Charlton Heston did an introduction!)

And, of course, the twinnapper STEALS HER BABIES FROM HER UTERUS VIA ILLICIT C-SECTION so the heroine goes after him -- bleeding from the surgical wound -- because a connection has formed from her womb to her brain (really) telling her where the babies are.

Also the twinnapper is her childhood friend, who has somehow risen to a high rank in the Stasi despite being the son of counter-revolutionaries and himself leading an anti-government group. But that is also a red herring.

Anyway. I'm gonna keep an eye out for German crime fiction in translation, but I think that's quite enough David Young for one lifetime, and also we have ten days left in 2023, I'm going to spend them reading books that weren't written by men.

(Watch my library holds all come in and make a liar of me!)

My currently reading is Power Without Glory (1950) by Frank Hardy, the Great Australian Communist Novel, which is mainly remembered these days for its (self) publication triggering Australia's last ever criminal libel trial. Hardy wasn't sued by any of the people he actually libelled*, the book being an almost embarrassingly obvious filing-off-of-the-serial-numbers-of-reality and openly suggesting that every second Labor politician in Australia was corrupt. No, the plaintiff was the wife of John Wren, the dude who is 100% the main character -- the book depicts her as having an affair with a brickie from which an illegitimate child ensues.

Hardy won the case because he was able to demonstrate that he did no research whatsoever into any of the women in John Wren's life. I would go further and suggest that it's possible he never met a woman, ever, in his entire life.**

Anyway, the book covers the life of "John West", an Irish Catholic who rises from poverty to control the gambling industry, organised crime and eventually Labor politics in the first half of the 20th century. If you're going, "Wait, is that not the plot of Peaky Blinders?" you're not alone, although West does not enter politics himself, nor does he fuck Diana Mosley in a House of Parliament.***

As an indictment of Australian politics, particularly the Australian Labor Party, the Catholic Church, the labour movement and the mining industry, it's excoriating, and a lot of facets are depressingly famiilar in the present day. Hardy's politics is such that The Only Good Politician Is The Socialist Who Quits The Fight In Favour of Ideological Purity, which maybe explains why he was not especially beloved by his fellow Communists.

As a novel it's less successful; obviously "show don't tell" is CIA propaganda, but I think Hardy would have benefited from less exposition. Or maybe an editor. This may in fact be one of the most successful self-published books in Australian literary history, although I suspect C. S. Pacat sold more before she got picked up by a publisher, and has also never been sued. Anyway, highlights include phonetically rendered regional accents, but not applied consistently; honestly most of the character voices are interchangeable; 80% of the female "characters" are sad nags who stay at home and wish their husbands were less corrupt. (One of John West's daughters becomes a Communist and elopes with a Jewish fellow traveller; she's the most sympathetic woman in the book, and therefore dies of breast cancer at the end.****)

Anyway, I'm at page 450 of about 600, and I have the new Murderbot waiting for me as a reward at the end. I've enjoyed stretching my literary boundaries and spending time with an out and out antihero, but honestly, "political novels written by men in the 1940s" is a hard sell for me, and I don't see that changing.

* Truth is not a complete defence in Australia, I think this is what the "upside down smiley" emoji is for
** He had a wife and children and his granddaughter is a prominent literary nepo baby, so there is some evidence I might be mistaken
*** No, that is actually a thing in Peaky Blinders
**** I'm shocking about reading the last page first

Current Music: I am not to be trusted with footnotes and we all know it

This post has been sitting in my head for a while, so it's neither current nor timely. HOWEVER. I've read a lot of non-fiction over the last couple of months, much of it loosely thematically linked. Let's go!

( History: it's quite good, did you know? )

Current Mood: cheerful

I started doing this as a reply to

selenak, and then realised this is something I discuss a lot, and it might be beneficial to have an actual post I can update and point people to.

AppleTV+ should be the most superfluous streaming service, right? It's the perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong with the streaming landscape: tech companies think they can make entertainment.

Unfortunately, AppleTV+ has invested a great deal of money into making a small number of very good shows.They're not all winners, but it has a much higher success-to-failure rate than the other streamers. It's frankly outrageous. They're sufficiently consistent that my household actually pays for our subscription instead of just getting a few free months here and there whenever we get a new device.

So if you find yourself with a free period, here are some recommendations:

Drama

The Morning Show is terrible. It thinks it's a prestige drama with a lot to say about the state of the media and the modern world. It has Sorkinesque aspirations.

It's actually a trashy workplace soap opera with a weirdly remarkable cast. Season 2 sees a character die by driving their car off an Italian cliff during the covid epidemic while Reese Witherspoon's character embarks on a relationship with a coworker played by Julianna Margulies. Jon Hamm plays a character best described as "sexy Elon Musk" or "fuckable Zuckerberg". Tig Notaro has two scenes as his assistant. Why? Who knows? This is not a good show, and not really a good example of the streamer's programming (it was launched as the flagship drama, and, um), but I can't stop watching.

[Content notes: the series opens with the characters facing a #MeToo scandal which escalates as sexual assaults are uncovered; a character commits suicide; the depiction of the early days of covid is all too real, and in line with its prestige pretensions, season 3 involves Reese's plucky reporter being on the ground in the Capitol on 6 Jan.]

WeCrashed is a dramatisation of the rise and fall of WeWork. This is another one that transcends mere questions of whether a show is "good" or "bad". It's thorougly entertaining and, at eight episodes, doesn't overstay its welcome.

[Content notes: Jared Leto.]

Slow Horses is an extremely unglamorous, down-to-earth British spy thriller. Gary Oldman plays an over-the-hill spy who has been pensioned off to The Place Where MI5 Stashes Its Incompetents, where he spends his time day drinking and engaging in workplace bullying, and very reluctantly occasionally rallying his crew to save the world. Or at least a small, British corner of it.

Kristen Scott Thomas and Sophie Okonedo play the top brass of MI5, and various generations of character actors appear in various roles.

[Content notes: Gary Oldman. And his character is thoroughly odious, too. Season 1 involves the abduction of a Muslim student by right wing extremists.]

Science Fiction

For All Mankind is an alternate history in which the USSR land a man on the moon before the United States, spurring a never-ending space race.

The second episode of this series is literally one of the worst things I have ever watched, with a lot of white American men being sad their destiny failed to manifest. Then in episode 3, someone goes, "Hey, maybe we can ... let women? Be astronauts?" And the next thing I knew, it was the season finale and I was utterly hooked, and now this is one of my favourite series.

Produced by Ronald D. Moore and has a bunch of ex-DS9 writers, if you're into that sort of thing. It has its flaws, but they're interesting ones, like the decision to use old age make-up instead of recasting characters, so you get to season 3 -- which is set in the '90s -- and have a lot of incredibly youthful 60 and 70 year olds running about.

[Content notes: depictions of mental illness, racism, sexism, homophobia, addiction. Season 2 features a relationship between a middle-aged woman and her friend's son, who is in his late teens or early 20s.]

Silo is an adaptation of Wool by Hugh Howey. I hadn't read the book when I watched it, and found it utterly compelling. It tells the story of a self-contained subterranean society in an apparently post-apocalyptic world. Or is it? I liked the characters, but I LOVED the worldbuilding. And after I read the book, I also loved the decision to gender-flip the heroine's mentor and cast Harriet Walter as a grumpy, agoraphobic lesbian.

[Content notes: nothing I can recall, oddly. I'm sure I've forgotten something.]

Foundation is an adaptation of the Isaac Asimov series. Where Silo is fairly faithful to its source, Foundation goes, "Okay, Isaac, you have all these bonkers ideas, but you know what you don't have? Women. People of colour. Queer people. Hey, what if a robot was a woman and she fucked? You need more clones, too."

The first season is quite messy, with a lot of ideas being thrown around while the plot unfolds verrrrrrry slowly. One reviewer compared it to a screensaver: it's gorgeous, but is anything really happening? Season 2 fixed that problem, although still involved a lot of people chasing a magic rubik's cube.

But is it really about the plot? Or is it about two characters who are close in age realising they're mother and daughter? Lee Pace playing an eternal line of clones, and also committing genocide while wearing a torn mesh top and culottes? Ben Davis playing a tortured general with an inappropriately young husband? The most delightful demisexual space cleric? Rachel House running a cult?

It's actually quite respectful of Asimov's ideas, in that it takes them very seriously while subverting expectations. The worst people in fandom hate it, which honestly is more than enough of a recommendation for me.

[Content notes: violence, death, misuse of mathematics. A sexual relationship between an adult clone and the robot who raised him from infancy.]

Severance is an SF psychological thriller whose protagonists have had their minds "severed" so that at home they have no memories of their time at work, and at work they have no memories of their time at home. (In fact, they do not even remember consenting to the severing process.)

It's a thriller -- needless to say, the company is up to no good -- but also just remarkably stylish and surreal in the way you'd expect from, say, a British surrealist spy drama of the '60s or early '70s. And also unexpectedly funny, though it's not at all a comedy. Did you need a tentative romance between John Turturro and Christopher Walken in your life? If the answer is yes, Apple is here for you.

[Content notes: I can't remember! Save that, despite being a show about workplace abuses, I remember reading that conditions on the set weren't great? I mean. Apple.]

Comedy

Ted Lasso is the tale of an American football coach who is hired to manage a premier-league ~~soccer~~ football team in London. He doesn't know anything about soccer, but that's okay, this is the team's new owner's ploy to destroy the one thing her ex-husband loves.

Ted Lasso has been massively hyped, and unfortunately lives up to it. I mean, some people say it doesn't hold up outside of a covid lockdown where everyone is desperate for connection (and this is very much a show about building connections), and some people hated the way the series ended (but it was exactly what I expected). It's kind of annoying that it's so good, because I am exactly the sort of grumpy contrarian who would like to hate it. But I did not.

[Content notes: boss/employee relationship; extremely heteronormative until season 3; some people were mad their OTPs didn't get together.]

Dickinson is an irreverent look at the early adult life of Emily Dickinson, her family, friends, and most of all, her romantic relationship with her best friend and sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert.

Often compared to The Great because both series are about young women and deal in intentional anachronisms, but I actually think Dickinson does a better job, not least because Emily's relationship with reality is extremely tenuous. Riding in a literal carriage with Death? Who is played by Wiz Khalifa? Sure! Travelling to the future and meeting Sylvia Plath? Absolutely! It works because the series is absolutely steeped in love and respect for Dickinson's life and work. I read a detailed bio of Dickinson between seasons, and was impressed at how much truth there was in the series.

[Content notes: got a lot of criticism, especially in season 1, for using a massive amount of Black music without including Black characters to any great extent. This was corrected to an extent in the ensuing seasons, especially with the addition of Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) to both the cast and the writing team, but still didn't quite click for some viewers.]

Mythic Quest is a workplace comedy set in a video game company. Notable for the extremely platonic relationship between the male and female leads, the fact that the female lead is an Australian woman of colour who is, frankly, really hard work and not very likeable (I love her), and its deep knowledge and affection for nerd culture.

I haven't watched the third season yet, because it's oddly loud in a way that I need to be in the right mood for, but it's a really good time if you've played video games or spent any time in the WorldCon end of the SFF community.

[Content notes: F Murray Abraham played an elderly, Hugo Award-winning novelist who was brought on to write the titular game, but actually spends most of his time being a racist, sexist jerk. Apparently art imitated life, because he was fired for harassment in the third season. This is good, but also a shame because honestly, it was an amazing satire of that guy we all know in fandom. Season 2 features a standalone episode about that character in his youth, and it's one of the best depictions of the SF community of the 1950s that I've ever seen.]

And also

Making this post, I've realised there's so much on AppleTV+ that I haven't watched yet. The Pachinko adaptation. A series about Idris Elba on a hijacked plane. Something with Tom Hiddleston as a horny priest? And they all have okay-or-better reviews. Literally the only thing on the service I've seen get actively bad reviews was Invasion, and honestly? Fair. Everything else seems to be mediocre-or-better, and as you can see, right now Apple's mediocrity is still better than a Netflix original that will be cancelled after a season. Apple seems to be using its bottomless wealth to take creative risks, and I respect that a lot.

Suffice to say, American Prometheus left me with a book hangover, much like Oppenheimer is still on my mind a month after I saw it. I started a lot of books, and eventually finished some.

Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor

The third in this series, and probably where I'm going to leave it for now, as each successive time skip makes me like the protagonist less. I note that his interactions with Catilina were extremely homoerotic, but, being spoiled for the end of the Catilinian Conspiracy, I couldn't really get excited about that.

Not finished: Paper Emperors: The rise of Australia’s newspaper empires by Sally Young

I got about 60% through this, which I think is enough to make it worth writing up. A fascinating topic, but I simply could not with Young's structure, which divided events up by newspaper company instead of chronologically. This is especially frustrating because various Murdochs and Packers were moving from company to company, so the narrative kept doubling back. It's a shame, because this book and its sequel are the definitive examinations of the Australian media landscape through history.

A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum by Emma Southon

A genuinely fascinating blend of serious scholarship and pop history, conveyed in a chatty style that makes me very much want to sit down and split a bottle of wine with Southon. Example:

When Augustus began creating the Roman imperial system, which he cutely called the Principate, when he was still called Octavian, he did so off the back of winning two civil wars, creating his own private army, and enacting a series of proscriptions that had around two thousand people arrested and executed for crimes as minor as 'Existing as Cicero' or 'Being Really Rich' or 'Friendship ended with Marcus Favonius, now Marcus Antonius is my best friend'. Thus, before the Principate even officially existed, it was bathed in the blood of the upper classes, and god knows how many working free and enslaved people died in the process.

Whether this style works for you is entirely a matter of taste, but I was sufficiently indoctrinated into the Cult of Classical History that making fun of Cicero feels a bit subversive. So it very much worked for me, and I learned a lot from Southon's examination of the Roman understanding of "murder" as a concept.

Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of Cold War Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew and Annette Lawrence Drew

Weird fact about me: I fucking love shipwrecks and submarines and reading about maritime disasters. There was a time, in my teens, when I was going to become a marine archaeologist. There are a bunch of reasons that didn't happen, starting with the fact that I'm a very poor swimmer and also terrified of drowning, and if you spend a lot of time reading about maritime disasters ... well. Suffice to say, the whole Ocean Gate fiasco was extremely relevant to my interests on a bunch of levels.

I'm still catching up on the backlog of Behind the Bastards, but I skipped ahead to the episode on OceanGate. Host Robert Evans mentioned this book in passing, and I hunted down a copy (I had to buy the paperback from Amazon Japan) and read it with great interest.

If you're into submarines, espionage and really terrible events happening at sea is your jam, this might be the book for you! It's a bit episodic, but interestingly skeptical about the military industrial complex -- more than I expected, anyway. I personally think it should be required reading for any writer working on a Star Trek, but that's just me (and my love of submarine nonsense).

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

Reads like the tawdry Succession knock-off that Showtime desperately needs right now, except that because of the events of this book, and the total ineptitude demonstrated at Paramount/Viacom/CBS, Showtime has been folded into Paramount+.

A very quick, easy read, which I think goes a little too far in depicting Shari Redstone as a totally relatable busy working mom/adult child caring for elderly parent/billionairess girlboss/friend of Donald Trump. But at the same time, the way she is treated by Les Moonves and the various boards kind of makes it hard not to be on her side, just a little. Fortunately, I have four seasons of having feelings about Shiv Roy under my belt, so I have practice at this sort of thing.

The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper

"Where is all the Roman historical fiction from the perspective of the enslaved?" I wondered, and the answer was right here. The Wolf Den follows an enslaved prostitute* in Pompeii as she engages in a battle of wits with her enslaver and schemes to regain her freedom at any cost.

There's a notable lack of obvious historical figures, save for a brief appearance by Pliny the Elder -- but I read through the list of excavated buildings in Pompeii and recognised every single one. Harper is mainly concerned with the Roman lower classes, which makes this a refreshing read. Although not an easy one: I think Harper handles the matter of sex with caution and respect, but obviously this is a book with rape at its core.

* Harper uses the modern language of "enslaved" and "enslaver", and I know I'm usually out here complaining about anachronisms, but it works perfectly here because Amara never regards slavery as anything but something done to her. At the same time, Harper refers to "prostitutes" not "sex workers", which I think is reasonable: it might be an anachronism too far, and it almost imbues this situation with a dignity that absolutely did not exist.

A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods by Margaret Cook

First of all, that is an amazing title.

Second, this was a very enjoyable and informative book which covers a lot of what I shall loosely call ground, although you wouldn't want to build your house on it. I inhaled this on a plane on the weekend, and very much wished I had a pen so I could annotate it with notes like, "I lived here!" and "My brother went to school there!" and "I don't hold a hose, comrade." (Turns out that Gough Whitlam had a real problem with turning up to the sites of natural disasters. Great man, but an absolute tosser.)

My edition was updated to include the 2022 floods, and also goes into some detail about the current culture war taking place around dam management and whether or not Brisbane needs more dams (absolutely not, but try telling people that).

Currently reading:

Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore by Emma Southon

Do I know any necromancers? I need to fight Robert Graves in a Red Rooster carpark.

Title: the meteors these days are the size of corpses
Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery
Wordcount: 47,380
Rating: adult
Characters: Gabriel Lorca, Katrina Cornwell, L'Rell, misc ensemble
Pairing(s): Gabriel Lorca/Katrina Cornwell

Warning(s): I used "chooses not to warn" on AO3, because I feel like it's always more complicated than straight up rape/non-con where the mirrorverse is involved. Suffice to say, there are allusions to outright assault, and questions arise as to whether consent can be meaningful in some circumstances. Also a lot of people die, on page and off, and there's torture and slavery and problematic elements all over the place. Your fave is problematic: the mirror universe. But you probably knew that, right?

Notes: Originally posted to AO3 in 2018, so before season 2 of Discovery had dropped.

I meant it when I said slow burn, sorry. I think the shipping starts in earnest around maybe chapter 6? (I swear, I started this thinking it'd be an easy 5,000 words. 10,000 at most.) Vaguely compliant with Drastic Measures, but there's no need to have read it.

The Terran medical division uniforms being red instead of white is from an interview with Gersha Phillips, which honestly just put a mental image in my head that left me needing to write this; interrogators being part of medical is my own conceit, but whatever, it makes sense. Sort of. Just work with me here and remember this was a few years before "Terra Firma".

Title is from "There's a War Going on for your Mind" by the Flobots, because for some reason this fandom lends itself to long, pretentious titles. Beta'd by NonElvis, who it turns out was writing more or less the same plot but with different characters. We're friends because we're into the same things, right?

Summary: Trapped in the mirror universe, Gabriel Lorca makes a deal with the devil: if he works for Inquisitor Cornwell, she will find him a way home. The question is, what will he become in the meantime?

( Gonna post a chapter a day so as not to overwhelm you. Also there are sequels. Sorry. Not sorry. )

Fandom: Star Trek: Picard
Rating: all-ages
Characters: Laris, Zhaban
Pairing(s): Laris/Zhaban
Notes: Originally posted to AO3 in March 2020. The AO3 notes were, "So it turns out that a good way to get out of a COVID-19 anxiety spiral is to write fic. (But not your novel, and definitely not working on anything related to your actual job.) As threatened/promised, another Dessa title. The timeline is possibly unlikely; I just like the idea of Laris and Zhaban being much older than they appear."

Summary: Earthers sometimes ask how Laris and Zhaban met. They construct charming stories and never tell the same one twice, and only a handful of people know the truth.

( Nothing spurs you on to get your fic backed up like a DDoS attack on AO3! )

I used to think I didn't really enjoy watching movies. But a couple of years ago, I realised that the only movies I was actually seeing were MCU films. I've been making an effort to widen my movie viewing, which mainly means I've watched a lot of mainstream Oscar-bait and also extremely successful action movies that aren't comic book adaptations. I have a Letterboxd account and everything!

Obviously I am seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer in the same week. (Not the same day, that would probably give me a migraine.)

My Barbie prep consisted of spending a morning thinking about the specific ways I played with Barbies, and then going out, buying the cheapest doll Kmart had to offer, and ordering a bunch of bundles of clothes off eBay. (You can't just buy fashion packs the way you could when we were younger -- I mean, you can, but they're expensive, hard to find and not great quality. Meanwhile, clothes made for the OG Barbies with the tiny waist more or less fit the current standard body type, you just might have to resign yourself to the fact they won't do up in the back. Yes, I am looking at making my own Barbie clothes. No, I am not embarrassed.)

There doesn't appear to be an Oppenheimer doll, so for that movie, I read the biography on which it's based: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. This is a super dense book, and took the entire week to read, BUT it is not excessively heavy on quantum physics. It does, however, have a lot of university politics and the fairly delightful detail that mathematics departments are extremely high drama compared with, say, any humanities department. (The authors posit that this is because mathematicians tend to reach their intellectual peak at a very young age, and so find themselves with little meaningful work, whereas a poet or historian can continue doing significant work until his or her retirement. "Teaching" in this instance does not count as meaningful work.)

Oppenheimer emerges as a complex and interesting man, and basically decent in a way I didn't expect. Arrogant, but in a particular way where he is good to his subordinates and an absolute asshole to his superiors if he finds them lacking. The authors spend a remarkable amount of time describing his frail body, his high cheekbones and his piercing blue eyes; clearly this is the role Cillian Murphy was born to play.

I'm especially interested to see how the movie depicts Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, who seems to have been a complex person -- splitting the book's sources roughly by gender, men regarded her as either a broken bird or a heinous bitch, and women said she was "complicated". She and her husband both seem like they were incredibly hard work, but I feel like part of the criticism of Kitty is that she wasn't very good at softening him or making him more socially acceptable. Like, she knew that was her job as The Wife, but she didn't have the skills to do so and wasn't terribly interested in learning. And you know what? Fair.

Yaqui Delgado Wants To Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina

A very serious YA novel about bullying: a nerdy light-skinned Cuban-American girl is forced to change schools, and the titular Yaqui takes against her. Piddy goes through several months of psychological torture, culminating in a physical attack that winds up on YouTube.

Honestly, this felt more like older MG/young YA than the older YA it was marketed as -- despite having some fairly graphic sexual content. I absolutely inhaled it, but found it unsatisfying, especially the "if you tell the school administration you are being bullied, they will do everything in their power to protect you" conclusion.

The Arms of Nemesis by Steven Saylor

The second in Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series. Gordianus the Finder is dispatched to investigate the murder of a wealthy Roman's client; meanwhile, a guy called Spartacus is leading a wee bit of a slave rebellion. This was a much breezier read than the first book, and kind of suffered for it -- the emotional climax, to me, is Gordianus realising he is no longer comfortable with the institution of slavery, freeing his slave/lover and marrying her. (Their relationship is as consensual as is possible under the circumstances and in a culture where "consent" isn't really a concept for anyone except men, but also we never get Bethesda's POV, so who knows?) All that happens between chapters, effectively off-screen, which was annoying.

Having said all that, this was still a good read, and I'm inclined to keep going with the series.

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

Literary mystery in which a successful podcaster -- think Karina Longworth of You Must Remember This, but with kids and a husband who is more problematic than Rian Johnson -- returns to her old boarding school to teach a two-week course. In 1995, her roommate was murdered; now one of her students wants to make a true crime podcast, arguing that the Black man convicted of the crime was innocent. This leads the podcaster to revisit her memories and realise that her roommate was having an "affair" with their music teacher -- who probably killed her. Meanwhile, her husband is being cancelled on Twitter for having had an affair with a 21-year-old when he was 36.

There is a LOT happening in this book. Maybe too much? Maybe just enough? Makkai covers a lot of ground, from race and class to power differences in relationships to the ethics of the true crime media industry, and it's all surrounded by the white noise of violence against women. It's hard to tell with an ebook, but I think this must be quite a thick volume -- I kept thinking, "Oh, this is the fifty percent mark," and finding I had barely made a dent. I very much enjoyed it, but then, boarding schools + true crime podcasts is kind of my jam. The heroine is incredibly messy in a way I liked, despite the fact that -- with her married lover, Twitter rants and complete disrespect for the sequestration of witnesses, I think she's not meant to be likeable.

Rating: all-ages
Warnings: Mild body horror; I'm still pretty mad about how season 2 ended, if you were wondering
Relationships: Katrina Cornwell/the version of Prime Gabriel Lorca that exists primarily in my head
Characters: Katrina Cornwell, Gabriel Lorca, Ash Tyler, Elizabeth Dehner, Christopher Pike
Notes: Sequel to "Clarified by Fire"; AO3 freeform tags included "section 31", "post Mirror Universe trauma" and "canon-noncompliant degree of mental healthcare"

Summary: He's back in his own universe, but 'home' isn't what it used to be.

( The AO3 notes also included the words 'I AM BACK ON MY BULLSHIT', and I think we can just take that as read going forward )

Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery
Rating: All ages
Characters: Katrina Cornwell, Gabriel Lorca
Pairing(s): Katrina Cornwell/Gabriel Lorca
Notes: Written for Katoberfest 2022

Summary: They used to be rivals; now they're friends. Could they be ... more? Cadet Lorca gives Cadet Cornwell a tour of his home town. Day 6 of Katoberfest 2022: Rom-Com.

( This was going to be part of a 5 Things fic, but my brain was approximately 85% mashed potato. )

Fandom: Star Trek: Picard
Rating: all-ages
Characters: Beverly Crusher, Jack Crusher (the younger), Zhaban
Pairing(s): Picard/Crusher
Notes: "Oh no, Beverly, London is far too close to France," I said to the TV, "and also we don't need an explanation for why Picard's secret kid as an inexplicable British accent, it was a mistake to let reply guys write television." Anyway, this definitely happened; the only question is whether he told Laris, and my opinion varies depending on what I find funnier at any given moment.

Summary: Zhaban never forgets a face. And today he is recognising a person he has never met.

( The admiral kept her picture on his desk, and only mentioned her when it was late at night and the wine had flown too freely. Yet here she was. In London. Practically on the admiral's doorstep. And also two tables away from Zhaban, eating fish and chips off a replicated facsimile of a newspaper in a centuries-old food market near the river. )

I have not had much to say about the current AO3/OTW debacle, save that I used to think they needed to make some changes to address racist harassment on the archive, and now I think we need to throw the whole org out and start over. (At the very least, Legal needs to go.)

But I've felt for a while that, with the AO3's spaghetti code problem, at least, it was a mistake to put all our fic eggs in one basket. The archive was never meant to become the sole repository of fic for all fandoms, but that's what it accidentally became.

I got myself a NeoCities account and tried to create a website, but it's hard? I can't believe I used to do this all the time? Do you know how much fic I have on AO3 that I would need to copy over?

Dreamwidth, on the other hand, has everything going back to my LJ days, so there's just some Voyager fic missing. (I really should scour Trekiverse and the Wayback Machine, but that's a project for a future day.) So please bear with me as I post a few years of fic here over the next few weeks. Including, God help us you, chapter fic, which isn't exactly something I had to deal with much back in the day.

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Page Summary

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 poster icons
Arkhangelsk by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel
The Mirror Visitor quartet did not stick the landing
January in books
"Come In Spinner" by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James
2023 reading round-up
Okay, men are allowed to write SOME books
That's enough books by men for 2023
Power Without Glory
Recent non-fiction reading, with a bonus appearance by Kate Mulgrew
AppleTV+ recommendations
It's been a while between book posts!
FIC: the meteors these days are the size of corpses (Star Trek: DSC | Lorca/Cornwell | adult | 1/19)
FIC: bare-faced at your masquerade (Star Trek: Picard | Laris/Zhaban | all-ages)
Books (and movies)
Books inhaled
FIC: Running in the Dark (Star Trek: Discovery | Lorca/Cornwell | all ages | 7,500 words)
FIC: Pieces of the Story (Star Trek: Discovery, Cornwell/Lorca, all-ages)
FIC: Family Secrets (Star Trek: Picard | Picard/Crusher, Zhaban, all-ages)
Mirroring fic at Dreamwidth

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Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

Saving the world through the power of, um ... oh dear.

Recent Entries

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 poster icons

Arkhangelsk by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

The Mirror Visitor quartet did not stick the landing

January in books

"Come In Spinner" by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James

2023 reading round-up

Okay, men are allowed to write SOME books

That's enough books by men for 2023

Power Without Glory

Recent non-fiction reading, with a bonus appearance by Kate Mulgrew

AppleTV+ recommendations

It's been a while between book posts!

FIC: the meteors these days are the size of corpses (Star Trek: DSC | Lorca/Cornwell | adult | 1/19)

FIC: bare-faced at your masquerade (Star Trek: Picard | Laris/Zhaban | all-ages)

Books (and movies)

Books inhaled

FIC: Running in the Dark (Star Trek: Discovery | Lorca/Cornwell | all ages | 7,500 words)

FIC: Pieces of the Story (Star Trek: Discovery, Cornwell/Lorca, all-ages)

FIC: Family Secrets (Star Trek: Picard | Picard/Crusher, Zhaban, all-ages)

Mirroring fic at Dreamwidth