vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. V excited that I can read physical books at the moment without my hands yelling at me (hurrah for ring splints). Head On (John Scalzi) and record of a spaceborn few (Becky Chambers) in hard copy; I'm now making substantial progress through The Collapsing Empire (also John Scalzi) in ebook, because I got to the top of the library queue. (For reference, also on hold: Feel Free, being collected essays by Zadie Smith; Daring Greatly, Brené Brown, having failed to get together the brain to read it when I got it out the library in hard copy a while back; The Consuming Fire, John Scalzi, sequel to TCE; Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney. There's a fair chance that I'll suspend the holds on both the Smith and the Brown just because they are likely to be fairly heavy going and, as discussed in therapy a few weeks back, it is actually okay for me to read for fun at the moment.)

Head On I got around to reading, finally, because it was Right There on the library bookshelf when I was dithering over something else; I did very much enjoy Lock In, not least because disabled! gender-neutral! protagonist!, but I think I've managed a slightly better round of gender diversity in my reading since that was published and in consequence was a bit less basking-in-the-character, and also Chris' voice ~felt~ more masculine to me this time around -- though this might be because it employs a brand of snark often found in Scalzi's blog, and it turns out that The Collapsing Empire has a character I'm parsing similarly who is very definitely female, so I'm probably doing it an injustice. Anyway: sportsball! More worldbuilding! I'm not... entirely convinced by all the Very Professional Very Wealthy Professionals (and their competence), but it was a quick and pleasant read and it's always nice to spend time with characters who Actually Get It about mobility impairment.

record of a spaceborn few I (1) had a lot of quibbles with, and (2) loved A Lot, like, I started crying within the first couple of chapters and then just... kept periodically bursting into tears.

Here are some things I love about it: gardening. Closed systems and recycling and composting. Welcome rites and death rites. Tension between new and old, old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. How you build a society and keep it functioning (because this is one that's not exactly post-scarcity but is functional in terms of providing universal basic income, with a barter economy on top), and how you integrate it with other societies running on very different systems, and how you conceptualise those interactions. Record-keeping, and the storing of stories.

Here are some things that I found vexing: I'm slightly suspicious of the ability to actually fully compost a human corpse, including the bones, in 40 days, even with hot composting (though I've looked up the company Chambers was drawing on). I'm a bit dubious about the amount of attention paid to balancing carbon and nitrogen in a hot-composting set-up. I was very exasperated with the framing conceit that This Species Has A Gestural Language That We Cannot Possibly Translate Literally Because No Other Written Language In The Entire Galactic Commons Features Gestures, What Do, because. like. Sutton SignWriting, Stokoe notation, BSL variants of same, UK baby's legal name is signed, etc etc etc. And! For bonus points! In this entirely closed system, where everything is recycled, we are... somehow supposed to believe... that bamboo fibre is the most viable fabric they have. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH PROCESSING, etc.

All of which is to say, in summary, that having also really loved the second book (while being exasperated by aspects of that, too), I think I begin to see why anyone actually liked the first one, which did absolutely nothing for me other than irritate me. Specifically: I absolutely did not care about any of the characters in the first book, in that I found them all to be unlikeable at best but mostly unbelievable cardboard cutouts, and the framing story also failed to get my attention. But: my annoyance with the details in the second and third books have been largely outweighed by how iddy they are for me, how much they are A Story I Care About, and while I don't actually Get It about the first one I do now have a sense of How It Might Have Worked for people.

(Amusingly, a friend with whom I have significantly overlapping taste hated the long way to a small, angry planet... and also didn't care for a closed and common orbit, though we had a good chat about that while she was gearing up to read record of a spaceborn few.)

Film/TV. Leverage. It is Leverage. I am still kind of fascinated by it but, like, I cannot quite deal with Eliot, last episode, having... decided that Parker was incompetent? For reasons of plot convenience? Obviously she wasn't, but. Oh children.

Growth. AHAHAHA SO MUCH. Headlines:

• I've repotted the lemon!
  
• I've provided some timelapse photography of the plot!
  
• I've borrowed a cordless drill and made significant progress with building my raised bed edging! (This also counts as a Skill Acquisition, especially as I was doing so without more competent supervision.)
  
• I've fixed the broken autovent on the roof of the greenhouse! (Ish. It's possible I need to get a new wax cylinder; it's not opening as much as I really feel it ought.)
  
• ............ I found the carpet.
  
• It is, you see, The Rule that every allotment plot is absolutely chock-full of fundamentally made-of-plastic carpet.
  
• I thought I'd got away with it.
  
• I tried to dig a hole to put the legs of the raised bed into.
  
• ... I hit carpet.
  
• I have found at least two layers.
  
• I... I think they extend underneath all the raised beds.
  
• The raised beds in which I am growing spinach, and fennel, and allium various.
  
• The raised beds I weeded thoroughly last year and then manured and then left to get themselves set up with decent soil structure and generally getting going with a no-dig philosophy.
  
• That I'm now going to have to dig up.
  
• To get out the carpet.

Notable Pokémon. Another (!) shiny Eevee. Hatched a Really Rather Good Beldum. No event-specific shinies yet, of course, but there we go.

Comments

[alexwlchan]

I’m glad you enjoyed Record of a Spaceborn Few! I did a lot of crying during this one as well :D

(Help me out, what’s “iddy” in this context?)

[alexseanchai]

you know id, ego, superego? v pleasing unto the first one

[kaberett]

right yes idfic is a fannish term!

[alexseanchai]

*eyes convo with azurelunatic & silveradept*

...just how suspiciously short is that forty days, exactly

[kaberett]

tl;dr it depends a bit on What Exactly You're Doing, but generally if you want bones to compost in a reasonable timeframe you want to boil them up or burn them or grind them or at least chop them up a bit first, which... I do not get the impression that Recompose is intending to put corpses through a mulcher, and certainly that's not how it worked in the book! I would be fascinated to know more details about how exactly they are achieving this, because on the face of it I'm very much at ???!

[kaberett]

AHA YES: it's drawing on research that shows that livestock bones have started decomposing after two months. This is based on a somewhat different design so mi-i-i-i-ight do better at handling bones, but I have yet to find any evidence that they'd really be entirely Dealt With in forty days.

[alexseanchai]

*nodnod*

(one does not eat apex predators, you understand)

[angelofthenorth]

Will be interested in what you make of the Rooney. I loved normal people, but couldn't finish cwf

[kaberett]

Apparently I'm not expecting to get to the top of the library queue for another ~3 months, but I will post about it when I do!

[fyreharper]

D: at having to dig out carpet

[kaberett]

it is Very Bad, and also Not A Good

[skygiants]

I am not a book-cryer almost ever but I also found myself very unexpectedly almost crying at certain moments in Record of a Spaceborn Few, just from a sense of - possibility? the pragmatic expression of the belief that humans can build a broadly functioning society, which sometimes these days seems very far away.

(...and I also did not get very much out of Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

[kaberett]

YES THESE THINGS.

I think, distilled, it's the belief-in-humans that permeates it that gets me? Believing-in-the-capacity-of-people-to-do-good-especially-when-it's-complicated is something I am a sucker for, and I think this did that sufficiently well that it carried the ... BUT SCIENCE? for me!

[kaberett]

GENERATIONAL TRAUMA. Generational trauma was the other thing that Chambers seemed to weirdly completely fail to get! With specific reference to "well why did the first generation bother with Making The Homesteaders More Like Earth, they could have looked like ANYTHING about only the FIRST generation would have been affected, subsequent generations WOULD NEVER HAVE KNOWN ANYTHING ELSE and WOULD HAVE ADAPTED JUST FINE" -- and like.

My bro.

My dude.

No.

[hydrangea]

...carpet. buried. I feel like this must be some cultural thing.

The only thing the allotments here seems to be filled with is illegal buildings.

[tree_and_leaf]

I think it was intended to control weeds? But I may have got the wrong end of the stick.

[kaberett]

Yes precisely! Just... really ineffectually and infuriatingly!

[kaberett]

Yes, as tree_and_leaf says, old carpet has been Traditionally used for weed-suppression -- you stick it down over the soil you want cleared of weeds, and it blocks light and is tough enough to prevent things growing up through it sufficiently rapidly to take over.

Which is fine if it's all made of hemp and wool and will actually biodegrade in a human lifespan! And is much less good if it's entirely made of plastic.

[worlds_of_smoke]

re: having to dig out the carpet: Oh no. D: D: D:

[vass]

Ugh, re carpet. (Whoever lived where I do now used plastic sheeting. It did not stop the weeds, and is really fucking annoying.)

Re Head On: did he introduce any characters who have locked-in syndrome but are not Hadens? jeshyr and I were talking about that recently as one major flaw of the first book.

Thanks for the write-up of record of a spaceborn few. I'm definitely going to give her enough of a second chance to read at least a closed and common orbit, and I'm glad you got something out of the third book too.

(Speaking of light reading, if you liked qian's Sorcerer to the Crown and didn't know, the second one is out. I mention this because I know I'm not the only person who hadn't heard and went WAIT WHAT and ran to find it. If you haven't read the first, here's your reminder that it's a thing that exists and is fun reading.)

[kaberett]

Weeds: HAHAHA NOPE. Instead! They've just grown ON TOP! and occasionally through! making it even harder to get rid of! but I have today (i) formulated A Plan Of Attack, and (ii) got rid of 2sqm of the stuff.

Non-Hadens locked-in syndrome: nope, not that I noticed. There was however a bunch more about the neurological effects of Hadens, which may or may not mitigate that.

a closed and common orbit: is about autistic trans cyborgs working out how they want to be embodied and also how they want to people, and finding family, and experiencing love, and I Cared about it.

Sorcerer to the Crown: thank for rec but in fact I bounced off it quite badly (which was sad! because I'm actually really in to all of Zen Cho's short fiction! and I like The Night Circus and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell! And yet it just... did not work for me) so do not have high hopes I will get on any better with its sequel. <3

[vass]

Closing tabs:

Sorcerer to the Crown: thank for rec but in fact I bounced off it quite badly (which was sad! because I'm actually really in to all of Zen Cho's short fiction! and I like The Night Circus and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell! And yet it just... did not work for me) so do not have high hopes I will get on any better with its sequel. <3

Huh. For rec calibration, do you happen to know what about it made you bounce off? No worries if not.

spoilers for <i>SttC</i>

[kaberett]

Booklog notes (from 2015, ha):

Language is off, characterisation is remarkably inconsistent, and mostly I just want to reread P&P instead. (I can see why it's being compared to JS&MN. JS&MN is doing incomparably better with the same general idea IMO.) Also everyone is INCREDIBLY STUPID – Midsomer is a young man who unexpectedly returned from Faery, following which all flow of magic to England was stopped; young men are not expected to return! Why has nobody yet noticed that he offended Faery mightily! WHY IS HE BEING VAUNTED AS A SAVIOUR WHY HAVE NOT EVEN OUR PROTAGONISTS NOTICED THIS DISCREPANCY WHY IS EVERYONE SO STUPID

Unpacked slightly: the language felt very much like it was aiming for Regency and meeting it only inconsistently, in a way that nails-on-chalkboarded me; the romance seemed to be exactly the kind of unemotional pragmatics that I recall the main character engaging in this railing against; and I just... could not believe that the characters were as clever as we were being told they were.

Which, again, I was Deeply The Fuck Disappointed By, because I really liked all of the shorts and indeed still reread them because they are Soothing and Lovely, but also I have not wanted to squee-harsh about it and clearly a lot of people get a lot of enjoyment out of it so I've... not really talked about it much.

Re: spoilers for <i>SttC</i>

[vass]

Thank you for explaining. And I do appreciate the not wanting to squee-harsh. (Personally I did not deeply bond with the first book, but it was a fun, relaxing read for me and I didn't notice the things that you did that bothered you.)

One follow-up rec calibration question: do you tend to bounce off light Regency romances too?

Re: spoilers for <i>SttC</i>

[vass]

Also everyone is INCREDIBLY STUPID

I am now 272pp into The True Queen (out of 367) and am confident that if that bothered you about Sorcerer to the Crown it would also bother you in this book.

I'm enjoying it immensely as light, frothy fun, but it is SUCH an idiot plot.

It doesn't help that the... I forget the standard word for this, but what Jo Walton calls "incluing", the dropping details the reader doesn't know about the setting which the characters should, is done with a level of subtlety somewhere between a superhero comic ("I, Cyclops, also known as Scott Summers, will break down this door with my optic blasts!") and a celebrity Christmas special with actors starring as themselves. (Steven Colbert, answering the door, entire sentence in the vocative: "Timeless symbol of joy and mirth, Santa Claus!")

Re: spoilers for <i>SttC</i>

[kaberett]

Thank you for explaining and giving me more details, and I'm glad you're enjoying it <3

(Exposition?)

[shanaqui]

I read Lock In as male-voice the first time round, so when I picked up the audiobook I made sure to get the female-narrator version. It helped a lot in 'hearing' the voice as female when I read, too.

Record of a Spaceborn Few had me crying very early on too. I don't know how she does it, but always, for me.