I had a lot more free time this month, thank god. My family structure changed again; someone who was extremely, ridiculously high maintenance was removed from my life. And not a moment too soon, because I might’ve had a heart attack if that level of stress went on.
Because of that change, I’ve been reading more. Though not writing as much as I want. I’m slowly gearing back up, but most of my efforts have gone into managing my house, my dayjob, and the tortured-rabbit anxiety issues engendered by the events of last month. I’m lucky to have two wonderful partners I can lean on for breaks. As I write this, they’re cooking dinner on a Sunday night. <3
Short stories:
“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones
Chilling! Flash fiction done right. It was recommended that I read this comic alongside the short story, and I can see why they work thematically. Humans being subsumed by macabre spacesuits.
Cory Doctorow stories are always interesting to me because he often writes about current societal problems, particularly concerning technology, privacy, climate change, and social justice. I mean his stories are about the real-world issues, as they are happening to people today. Not dressed up in metaphor, translated to imaginary settings, or whatever— Nonfiction topics, fictionalized. I’m not used to that; I read a lot of news, a lot of blogs, a lot of essays, and a lot of short stories, but usually, not things where the streams cross. This story is about water protectors and hackers, and there are plenty of real people from both of those groups who write directly about their work.
Also, Tor has this extremely contemporary story tagged as “cyberpunk”… And they’re not wrong.
“The Memorial Tree” by Alaya Dawn Johnson
A wonderfully inventive, well-told story about two children orphaned by war and living after death.
“First: A Martian Hunts for the Red Planet’s Past—and His Own” by John Rogers
A sweet story about Opportunity.
“Set in Stone” by K. J. Parker
I didn’t take in the title until after I read the story. Clever fit. The narrator is a sculptor who stubbornly believes the propaganda of his failing king, even as he’s commissioned to create false military victories to mask defeat after defeat. He very much embodies the idea of a man whose mind cannot be changed.
“The Unwanted Guest” by Tamsyn Muir
The latest story set in the Locked Tomb Universe. Some weird and experimental stuff going on here, with screenplay format and a stageplay as a dream as a psychic battle for control. Plus, as always, Muir’s dialogue is spectacular.
Here’s a snippet I really enjoy the irony of, having read Nona the Ninth:
“Reconstructing “The Goldenrod Conspiracy,” Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30” by Gabriela Santiago
A clever sci-fi story that juxtaposes a fan event about reconstructing a lost episode from a fictitious, cult classic TV show, Backwards Man, with hints of an alternate history-style world that has culminated in a dark and dystopic present. The first hint is in the very first paragraph, and it’s more like a brick thrown through a window— “If you’ve eaten today…”
If you don’t see how these pieces fit together, this snippet might help:
At any rate, this story is very much steeped in online fannish culture, which looks pretty much the same even in this alternate world.
“Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit” by P. G. Wodehouse
This Jeeves and Wooster story is about Wooster pulling an inadvisable prank and Jeeves bailing him out. A banal example of the series, with less going on than other stories. Doesn’t have as much to do with Christmas as the title suggests.
Books:
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It’s actually a pretty easy read, despite the old-fashioned, literary style. It’s interesting that Doyle wrote a story wherein the supernatural elements were a hoax, when he would later be taken in by such hoaxes himself.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Delightful. Also, surprising. Nothing I read as a teen had this much sex, drugs, and violence in it, not even the adult books. Every other page had me going, “You can get away with this in YA??” And Andrews didn’t just get away with it, but this book is a modern classic, with starred reviews and a movie adaptation. And oh yeah, it’s been banned a bunch of times. That’s basically a badge of honor.
Anyway, I tore through this one, and it made me resolve to pare down my own YA writing for greater ease of reading. (I am so stressed by kid stuff lately that I don’t have the attention span to enjoy denser prose. If this is how most people who have kids or is a kid feels, then I’d better cater to that tired majority!) Andrews deploys every trick in the book to streamline his writing. The main character, Greg Gaines, is the narrator, and he will outright declare he’s skipping over things, or switch to screenplay formatting, or make bullet point or numbered lists. Props. I’m taking notes.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
The first installment in the Murderbot series! This is a reread. Apparently I read the first five Murderbot books back in 2020 (when Network Effect came out), though until I checked Wikipedia to refresh my memory, I thought I’d read them basically yesterday. I like Murderbot’s POV a lot, but some of its characterization gets repetitive, and these books can be extremely light on description. Very easy reads, so I bought a copy for my foster daughter’s boyfriend.
Comics:
Paper Girls vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang
This is another, “Huh? You can get away with that in YA?” book, when it comes to drugs, violence, and swearing. My daughter picked volume 1 out at her school library and I borrowed it from her, since I’d been meaning to read this series for a while. Brian Vaughan won me over with his storytelling in the original Runaways comics, now nearly 20 years old.
But, to be honest…reading Paper Girls mostly just reminded me that I tried out Vaughan’s award-winning Y: The Last Man and Saga series and didn’t like them. Or Paper Girls either. I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Maybe it’s just that I was a teenager when I read Runaways and my tastes have changed. But I remember being annoyed by the sheer density of fantastical elements in Saga. I felt the same way about Paper Girls, honestly. Time travel, aliens(?), warring factions, a dystopia, mutant teens from the future, pterodactyls, portals, other dimensions(?), giant monsters… There’s a whole heck of a lot happening to this squad of 12-year-old heroines. Hard to tell what actually matters, so I couldn’t get invested.
(Also, thinking about Saga reminded me— I’m not into grittiness, and especially not aesthetically. Of course sex, drugs, and violence exist, but I roll my eyes at fictional universes where all three combine to create this constant ambience of suck. It puts me in mind of the kind of dive bar bathrooms covered in eyebrow-raising graffiti where you end up making sinkside chitchat with a friendly meth addict, and thank god he has an alcohol wipe, because there’s no soap in the dispenser and every surface encountered has been obnoxiously sticky. And then you end up talking about the various grisly deaths of acquaintances who made poor choices, and laughing about how fucking dumb the world can be, and then agreeing that the jerks who run the bar need to put soap in the fucking dispenser. Because why let a tiny, fixable thing like that slide?
(I dunno, I guess what I’m saying is that I feel like most people want to feel good, and I wouldn’t spend my time with the ones who wanna feel bad instead. Media that perpetually yanks my gaze towards a chaotic miasma of edgy bullshit feels like attending a party run by people who revel in the negative. Ooooh, look at this shit!— Yeah, man, I’ve seen it before. I’m out. Peace.)