Kenneth Sutton's aide-mémoire
Oh my. Oh my goodness. Ann Leckie loved it, and I can see why. I am so very glad that there are three more on the way this year. The protagonist is a human/droid construct who calls itself Murderbot. I don’t love Murderbot quite as much as I love Breq (of Ann Leckie’s novels), but it comes very close.
The first sequel doesn’t drop until tomorrow, so today I started another of her series. (The Cloud Roads: The Books of the Raksura Book 1)
I finished this a while ago, at the beginning of a recent trip and have neglected blogging about it. For some reason, I remembered The Dispossessed as a long, difficult, not particularly enjoyable read. It was not! I liked it! And there were many details I had no recollection of. With more experience and less idealism than when I first read it in my twenties, the ambiguity of the situation appealed to me this time.
It’s interesting, however, that from the distance of just a couple of weeks, I once again don’t remember many of the details. In that sense, my original response stands, that this is very much a novel of ideas for me, and much less so about character or plot.
Light is the left hand of darkness,
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
Ursula Le Guin’s recent death has set me on a rereading journey (and a reading journey: there’s still plenty of her work I’ve never read). I decided to start with Left Hand of Darkness, and it was fascinating to reread it. It stands up to the passage of time, and yet has not aged well. It is still a suspenseful tale, and it proposes thought experiments that are still relevant today. But the gender norms that the terran diplomat Genly Ai expresses (written in 1969 and projected into some unstated but future time) are already out of date. Conceptions not only of roles but also of gender identity have changed in major ways that make parts of the narrative distracting.
This reread made me wonder why movies and television shows are routinely rebooted or redone but books rarely are (with the exception of parodies or pastiches that combine classic books with wildly different genre tropes). I’d really love to see a progressive, visionary, feminist author retell this story today.
My perspective on the two main characters has shifted since I first read the novel. The protagonist Genly Ai so struck me previously that I’ve used the name “Genly” in several online locations when I needed a handle. On this reading, however, perhaps because I’m now middle-aged and was then more Genly Ai’s contemporary in age, I identified with Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. Estraven is the moral center: restrained, patient, mature, visionary, committed to a greater good, capable of intentional self-sacrifice. Ai is no less fascinating as a character (indeed, flaws are often the most fascinating things about characters); it’s just that I’ve gained a fuller appreciation for Estraven.
Having spent a lot of time in Second Life over the past eleven years, parts of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash are downright quaint: the ways in which he needs to explain avatars, or virtual spaces, or the word “metaverse.” And there are things he describes that have been implemented almost word-for-word in Second Life, which is kind of creepy.
I enjoyed the story itself (and much more than Neuromancer, with which Snow Crash is often paired as precursors to parts of the internet and virtual reality). I’ve only read a few of Stephenson’s novels, but I rather enjoy the way they meander and take side trips.
I thought I might have read it a while ago, but absolutely nothing was familiar, so it must have been some other early cyberpunk novel. (I have Snow Crash up next, but its beginning isn’t ringing any bells, either.)
Not one of his best, but it was a quick, fun read. (Of his recent work, I most enjoyed The Collapsing Empire and am eager for its sequel.)
Finished it off in a little over a day. A satisfying (though fairly slight) episode in the ongoing science fiction soap opera.
Over the holidays, I reread the first four volumes of Ken Scholes’s The Psalms of Isaak in preparation for the release of the fifth and final volume. I’m glad I did. There were things I had missed or didn’t remember. Hymn, the final volume, provided a satisfying conclusion (albeit with a bit of a deus ex machina—which is a pun, should you read the books) while leaving the door open for future stories in the same world. I hope Scholes does continue creating here.
The books, in order: