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kaberettAlright, so. The collected works of Becky Chambers.
A caveat: I can, sort of, see the appeal, if I squint. I can see how they might be just right for someone's id. I even, mostly, look at the core idea and think oooh, that's interesting, I am interested in the exploration of this-- and then the execution, for the most part, leaves me anywhere from indifferent to frustrated.
As such, there's a serious risk that this post constitutes squee-harshing, so please approach with caution, because it is in fact okay to love things I dislike (and I won't think less of you if you do!).
Content notes for discussions of transmisia, medical gatekeeping, and (unrelated) gore. Spoilers for To Be Taught, If Fortunate, plus discussion of a key worldbuilding point in record of a spaceborn few.
The thing, I think, about To Be Taught, If Fortunate is that it fails, completely and categorically, to commit to its conceit. The idea is: it's a narrative account of a deep-space mission sent back to an Earth that's suffered a devastating technological setback. What we know, as readers and as point-of-view characters, is that there's been a geomagnetic storm that's knocked out surface civilization's ability to communicate even with ships in Earth orbit (but not, apparently, to prevent lunar stations providing automated responses to pings). The aim of this narrative account, composed circa 2170, is to provide context for the astronauts' question to the peoples (if any) of Earth: should we return home, as planned, or should we go on to explore a system that was deemed of interest but too far removed to be viable, accepting that that means we'll not be able to make it back?
The choice is yours, they say. Tell us what you want us to do, whenever you get this and whenever you can reply. We'll be in torpor; we're set to wake up when you respond -- or never, if you don't.
The thing is. The thing is. This message, this narrative, is in no way a plausible attempt to do what it pretends to be.
There's no indication that the message is sent on repeat, or that it's provided in any languages other than English. It's certainly not provided in plain English: the language is contrived and literary and dreamlike, a bizarre mixture of abstracts and technical language inexplicably accompanied by condescending explorations of ideas like "chirality" via the medium of stories-from-childhood. There is no rhyme or reason I can see to what gets defined, explained, and what doesn't -- at least not within the body of, the context of, the continuity of the text: despite pretending to be addressed to an Earth audience of unknown technological status circa 2200, it is painfully obvious that it's written for readers in the early C21, in ways that fundamentally undermine what (it claims) it is trying to do.
This leads, among other things, to an imagining of trans futures so lazy it's actually offensive. As a representation of a trans character in 2020, it's fine. A little heavy-handed, maybe, but fine. In 2150?
We're told, you see, that this spacefaring civilization is advanced enough to induce torpor in humans, resulting (combined with the relativistic effects of travelling at half the speed of light) in the equivalent of two years' aging over a fourteen-year journey. Gene therapy can "cure" colourblindness. Medical engineering can rewrite genetics to the extent that humans can metabolise stellar radiation, generate dermal glitter, or increase the strength of the entire musculoskeletal system to cope with four years living in twice Earth gravity -- and yet a trans man, in 2162, is receiving transdermal testosterone therapy, and talking about his "second puberty".
This is imagining a future in which trans children still don't have access to blockers; are still forced to go through a first, incorrect, puberty. It's imagining a trans future in which complete bodily rebuilds are available but somehow can't be applied to gonads. It's imagining a trans future in which we have stagnated, in which our language and our treatment options and our embodiment and our actualisation are frozen in 2020 even as we travel among the stars, and that? Good grief, that's so disappointing, so alienating, that it hurts.
This isn't the only place where the 2020 audience is clearly ascendant in the author's mind, but it's definitely the one I found most painful.
It's so frustrating to me because I think there could be something done with this idea, written like a scientist, that would be interesting and absorbing and novel: write it like a report, with the question up front and the supporting evidence and a discussion and definitions where necessary. Write it like you don't know what technology or systems of social organisation or scientific knowledge the recipients have. Write it like you're trying to communicate, not like you're trying to dazzle with your wordplay or show off your own cleverness.
(My tastes are not everyone's tastes. You don't have to agree with me about this. And also: nobody uses the pseudo-Linnean names for lifeforms they've spent four years observing in delight.)
But it doesn't, and it isn't, and then in the middle of that we get what are either egregious errors of continuity or hideously unclear writing (do messages take 14 years to get to you or not?! are scientific names given to new species by the astronauts in the field or by the taxonomists back home?!); and we get rank incompetence (in the form of an incredibly detailed mission plan apparently including nothing about what to do if local fauna try to eat you, or dealing with mental illness in multi-decade deep-space voyages, and a technical expert to whom it somehow totally fails to occur that unknown life forms attaching themselves to the hull and secreting unknown substances all over it, for months, might damage it); and we get science that ranges from the unimaginative to the wrong to the unimaginatively wrong.
In the first category: we're told that all Earth vertebrates exhibit bilateral symmetry. We're told that all Earth vertebrates are "working off the same blueprint". We're told that "This is not the case on Mirabilis." And our point-of-view character then goes on to describe... three phenotypes of bilaterally symmetric fauna.
In the second: as I quoted on Sunday,
This is not how anything works. Planetary systems spin because of conservation of the angular momentum of the gas clouds that form them, and Earth's spin is gradually slowing: we can tell this from records of eclipses and the fossil record provided by stromatolites. Venus does spin "backward" (compared to the Sun), and how exactly this ended up the case is a topic of active research, the literature actually concludes that the dense atmosphere of Venus plays an essential role in the dynamical history of this planet, imposing some constraints on the spin motion equations which limit its possible evolutions, which is not at all the same thing as "Venus isn't tidally locked because the atmosphere pushes on the mountains", or "bodies without thick atmospheres will inevitably be tidally locked": that's an oversimplification to the point of absurdity.
In the third category: closest to my heart is the concept that it's somehow degrading to wash your own test tubes, and that the lab manager wouldn't have more important things to do (!), and that individual scientists would be willing to let someone else from out-field clean their equipment. (I'm skewed by working in a clean lab processing a bunch of different metal isotopes, it's true, but even so.) Also, though, we have the author's imagining of how scientists imagine non-scientists engage with the world.
I could have loved this. I can so easily see how I could have loved this. But I didn't, and I don't, and I'm bitter about it.
As for record of a spaceborn few, you'll be pleased to hear that it's longer since I've read it and in any case I borrowed it from the library, so my complaints are much less detailed, but at its heart my contention is:
if compost is the emotional core of your story you have to get it right.
record of a spaceborn few takes place, mostly, on a generation ship, that for a long time was a closed system, and maintains the traditions established over the course of that history. Burial rites consist of composting human remains; the material produced is used on oxygen gardens, plants grown for display and for air rather than for consumption, which are in their turn composted and applied to food crops.
This should be my jam. I love this idea. I love the concept of the ritual and the ceremony and the solemnity and the respect.
But. But.
The bodies go in whole at the top of a (tall, hot) compost pile, with a careful mix of other components. After ninety days (or is it sixty? -- I don't have the text to hand) they come out the bottom, entirely broken down.
This... does not seem plausible.
Chambers cites, in acknowledgements, Recompose, a US corporation that grew out of the Urban Death Project. They claim that
I hot compost. Bones take over 90 days, even if they're small and chopped up. Chambers makes no mention of, for example, specially engineered bacteria to speed the process up. Which means... well.
When I first went poking around the Recompose website, they didn't discuss bones at all. At some point between then and now, they have addressed the issue... sort of. They now say:
To which all I can really say is: unless they're mixing the material with a woodchipper (or, to be fair, applying significant quantities of unpleasant acids), this? is bullshit. I cannot see any possible way for it to work. I cannot work out how on Earth (or off it!) it would otherwise be possible to fully compost large human bones in thirty days however carefully you engineer the environment. I can find absolutely no details of the process that make clear to me what's going on; the lead author's work on composting large animal mortalities reckons it takes months to decompose large bones.
And this breaks it for me. It breaks the entire foundational premise of the book. I'd be fine if the timescale wasn't specified, if it was allowed to take as long as it takes, but it is and it doesn't, and I just -- I find it so enormously frustrating.
A caveat: I can, sort of, see the appeal, if I squint. I can see how they might be just right for someone's id. I even, mostly, look at the core idea and think oooh, that's interesting, I am interested in the exploration of this-- and then the execution, for the most part, leaves me anywhere from indifferent to frustrated.
As such, there's a serious risk that this post constitutes squee-harshing, so please approach with caution, because it is in fact okay to love things I dislike (and I won't think less of you if you do!).
Content notes for discussions of transmisia, medical gatekeeping, and (unrelated) gore. Spoilers for To Be Taught, If Fortunate, plus discussion of a key worldbuilding point in record of a spaceborn few.
The thing, I think, about To Be Taught, If Fortunate is that it fails, completely and categorically, to commit to its conceit. The idea is: it's a narrative account of a deep-space mission sent back to an Earth that's suffered a devastating technological setback. What we know, as readers and as point-of-view characters, is that there's been a geomagnetic storm that's knocked out surface civilization's ability to communicate even with ships in Earth orbit (but not, apparently, to prevent lunar stations providing automated responses to pings). The aim of this narrative account, composed circa 2170, is to provide context for the astronauts' question to the peoples (if any) of Earth: should we return home, as planned, or should we go on to explore a system that was deemed of interest but too far removed to be viable, accepting that that means we'll not be able to make it back?
The choice is yours, they say. Tell us what you want us to do, whenever you get this and whenever you can reply. We'll be in torpor; we're set to wake up when you respond -- or never, if you don't.
The thing is. The thing is. This message, this narrative, is in no way a plausible attempt to do what it pretends to be.
There's no indication that the message is sent on repeat, or that it's provided in any languages other than English. It's certainly not provided in plain English: the language is contrived and literary and dreamlike, a bizarre mixture of abstracts and technical language inexplicably accompanied by condescending explorations of ideas like "chirality" via the medium of stories-from-childhood. There is no rhyme or reason I can see to what gets defined, explained, and what doesn't -- at least not within the body of, the context of, the continuity of the text: despite pretending to be addressed to an Earth audience of unknown technological status circa 2200, it is painfully obvious that it's written for readers in the early C21, in ways that fundamentally undermine what (it claims) it is trying to do.
This leads, among other things, to an imagining of trans futures so lazy it's actually offensive. As a representation of a trans character in 2020, it's fine. A little heavy-handed, maybe, but fine. In 2150?
We're told, you see, that this spacefaring civilization is advanced enough to induce torpor in humans, resulting (combined with the relativistic effects of travelling at half the speed of light) in the equivalent of two years' aging over a fourteen-year journey. Gene therapy can "cure" colourblindness. Medical engineering can rewrite genetics to the extent that humans can metabolise stellar radiation, generate dermal glitter, or increase the strength of the entire musculoskeletal system to cope with four years living in twice Earth gravity -- and yet a trans man, in 2162, is receiving transdermal testosterone therapy, and talking about his "second puberty".
This is imagining a future in which trans children still don't have access to blockers; are still forced to go through a first, incorrect, puberty. It's imagining a trans future in which complete bodily rebuilds are available but somehow can't be applied to gonads. It's imagining a trans future in which we have stagnated, in which our language and our treatment options and our embodiment and our actualisation are frozen in 2020 even as we travel among the stars, and that? Good grief, that's so disappointing, so alienating, that it hurts.
This isn't the only place where the 2020 audience is clearly ascendant in the author's mind, but it's definitely the one I found most painful.
It's so frustrating to me because I think there could be something done with this idea, written like a scientist, that would be interesting and absorbing and novel: write it like a report, with the question up front and the supporting evidence and a discussion and definitions where necessary. Write it like you don't know what technology or systems of social organisation or scientific knowledge the recipients have. Write it like you're trying to communicate, not like you're trying to dazzle with your wordplay or show off your own cleverness.
(My tastes are not everyone's tastes. You don't have to agree with me about this. And also: nobody uses the pseudo-Linnean names for lifeforms they've spent four years observing in delight.)
But it doesn't, and it isn't, and then in the middle of that we get what are either egregious errors of continuity or hideously unclear writing (do messages take 14 years to get to you or not?! are scientific names given to new species by the astronauts in the field or by the taxonomists back home?!); and we get rank incompetence (in the form of an incredibly detailed mission plan apparently including nothing about what to do if local fauna try to eat you, or dealing with mental illness in multi-decade deep-space voyages, and a technical expert to whom it somehow totally fails to occur that unknown life forms attaching themselves to the hull and secreting unknown substances all over it, for months, might damage it); and we get science that ranges from the unimaginative to the wrong to the unimaginatively wrong.
In the first category: we're told that all Earth vertebrates exhibit bilateral symmetry. We're told that all Earth vertebrates are "working off the same blueprint". We're told that "This is not the case on Mirabilis." And our point-of-view character then goes on to describe... three phenotypes of bilaterally symmetric fauna.
In the second: as I quoted on Sunday,
If Mirabilis and Opera had thin atmospheres, they likely would be locked with Zhenyi, but their thick quilts of clouds have a spin of their own, pushing against the surface as they whip around. This nudging is powerful enough to make a planet turn (an effect you can see on Venus as well).
In this regard, Votum, with its textbook tidal lock, is a more conventional planet. With an atmosphere only sixteen percent the thickness of Earth’s, there is not enough force to shove the mountains forward.
This is not how anything works. Planetary systems spin because of conservation of the angular momentum of the gas clouds that form them, and Earth's spin is gradually slowing: we can tell this from records of eclipses and the fossil record provided by stromatolites. Venus does spin "backward" (compared to the Sun), and how exactly this ended up the case is a topic of active research, the literature actually concludes that the dense atmosphere of Venus plays an essential role in the dynamical history of this planet, imposing some constraints on the spin motion equations which limit its possible evolutions, which is not at all the same thing as "Venus isn't tidally locked because the atmosphere pushes on the mountains", or "bodies without thick atmospheres will inevitably be tidally locked": that's an oversimplification to the point of absurdity.
In the third category: closest to my heart is the concept that it's somehow degrading to wash your own test tubes, and that the lab manager wouldn't have more important things to do (!), and that individual scientists would be willing to let someone else from out-field clean their equipment. (I'm skewed by working in a clean lab processing a bunch of different metal isotopes, it's true, but even so.) Also, though, we have the author's imagining of how scientists imagine non-scientists engage with the world.
I could have loved this. I can so easily see how I could have loved this. But I didn't, and I don't, and I'm bitter about it.
As for record of a spaceborn few, you'll be pleased to hear that it's longer since I've read it and in any case I borrowed it from the library, so my complaints are much less detailed, but at its heart my contention is:
if compost is the emotional core of your story you have to get it right.
record of a spaceborn few takes place, mostly, on a generation ship, that for a long time was a closed system, and maintains the traditions established over the course of that history. Burial rites consist of composting human remains; the material produced is used on oxygen gardens, plants grown for display and for air rather than for consumption, which are in their turn composted and applied to food crops.
This should be my jam. I love this idea. I love the concept of the ritual and the ceremony and the solemnity and the respect.
But. But.
The bodies go in whole at the top of a (tall, hot) compost pile, with a careful mix of other components. After ninety days (or is it sixty? -- I don't have the text to hand) they come out the bottom, entirely broken down.
This... does not seem plausible.
Chambers cites, in acknowledgements, Recompose, a US corporation that grew out of the Urban Death Project. They claim that
Our patent-pending process is modeled on green burial, but designed for our cities where land is scarce. Organic reduction happens inside of a vessel, which is modular and re-usable. Bodies are covered with wood chips and aerated, providing the perfect environment for naturally occurring microbes and beneficial bacteria. Over the span of about 30 days, the body is fully transformed, creating soil which can then be used to grow new life.
I hot compost. Bones take over 90 days, even if they're small and chopped up. Chambers makes no mention of, for example, specially engineered bacteria to speed the process up. Which means... well.
When I first went poking around the Recompose website, they didn't discuss bones at all. At some point between then and now, they have addressed the issue... sort of. They now say:
Everything - including bones and teeth – is transformed. That’s because our system creates the perfect environment for thermophilic (i.e. heat-loving) microbes and beneficial bacteria to break everything down quite quickly. By controlling the ratio of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and moisture, our system creates the perfect environment for these creatures to thrive. We also mix the material at several points during the process to ensure thorough decomposition.
At the end of the 30 days, we screen for non-organics and make sure the resultant soil is finished. The material we give back to families is much like the topsoil you'd buy at your local nursery. At the end of our process, all that remains is soft, beautiful soil.
To which all I can really say is: unless they're mixing the material with a woodchipper (or, to be fair, applying significant quantities of unpleasant acids), this? is bullshit. I cannot see any possible way for it to work. I cannot work out how on Earth (or off it!) it would otherwise be possible to fully compost large human bones in thirty days however carefully you engineer the environment. I can find absolutely no details of the process that make clear to me what's going on; the lead author's work on composting large animal mortalities reckons it takes months to decompose large bones.
And this breaks it for me. It breaks the entire foundational premise of the book. I'd be fine if the timescale wasn't specified, if it was allowed to take as long as it takes, but it is and it doesn't, and I just -- I find it so enormously frustrating.
a digression
Date: 2020-08-04 11:27 pm (UTC)(which on my end has unfortunately resulted in my having a hard time, conversely, with people hard-disliking much more than "meh, wasn't to my tastes" things I love... :/ )
Re: a digression
Date: 2020-08-05 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 12:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:05 am (UTC)you to join me in yelling about how Bad this isto hear your opinions on it" and I was feeling indulgent...(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 12:26 am (UTC)BONES TAKE LONGER THAN 30 DAYS EVEN IF CHIPPED DOWN SPORKY RAGE
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 02:06 am (UTC)!!!!!
like. dude, I only took chemistry up through my second semester of ochem.
in my BASIC GENERAL CHEMISTRY LAB, I got trained hard into thrice-rinsing my test tubes with HCl, or whatever the fuck was going in it, because we didn't do our own dishes per SE no but once you started working with your dishes you still had to assume it was contaminated with, at the LEAST, distilled water and that was A Problem for Really Proper Results.
my professor might've been a little bit absurdly picky about that for an undergrad gen chem lab, BUT LIKE. C'MON.
washing your own dishes is completely fucking expected in chemistry! because that's the only way you KNOW it's suitable for your experimental work!!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 02:07 pm (UTC)I really do not think I will ever be reading Chambers' stuff, because it's one thing to just... handwave the science, and it's another to get it actually fucking wrong.
(The composting thing. Is a whole different category of wtf.)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 02:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 04:00 pm (UTC)Also, I'm sure you could still be Clueless Trans, and go through at least part of puberty 1.0 before going No Wait This Is Shit. But they could at least have had a Magic Gene Therapy for it.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-06 01:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-07 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-08 04:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 04:34 am (UTC)And wow, seriously, 30 days? No way. ("And we lie in our beds and our graves, unable to save ourselves from the quaint tragedies we invent and undo...")
This is imagining a future in which trans children still don't have access to blockers; are still forced to go through a first, incorrect, puberty. It's imagining a trans future in which complete bodily rebuilds are available but somehow can't be applied to gonads.
I could accept the first part of that more easily, because the future I want to see is one in which people can come to a new understanding of their genders later on, in addition to being allowed to transition early. A future in which it's understood and not penalised for people to have changing genders/relationships to gender/etc. The latter, though, is just worldbuilding fail.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:14 am (UTC)WOODCHIPPER.
I could accept the first part of that more easily, because the future I want to see is one in which people can come to a new understanding of their genders later on, in addition to being allowed to transition early. A future in which it's understood and not penalised for people to have changing genders/relationships to gender/etc. The latter, though, is just worldbuilding fail.
You are right, and I did consider this and then didn't include it, and I should have, and I'm sorry for the omission <3 Personally I'm... not sufficiently convince that Chambers has actually thought this shit through to be willing to extend the benefit of the doubt on this being a deliberate representation of a variety and range of trans futures rather than just having... not thought about it, especially given that this is the entire extent of the discussion of What Transition Is Like In The Twenty-Second Century, but my reluctance to interpret generously doesn't mean a generous interpretation isn't possible. <3
(I think there's probably also a thing about how -- we're still working with a strictly dyadic concept of gender, and only Functional and Approved body-mods exist? Really? No body-mods outside "A Man" or "A Woman"? Are... are genderqueer people and customisable bodies just not a thing?)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-06 02:10 pm (UTC)I can't imagine all the ways they haven't thought about racialized bodies and body mods, or dis/abilty diversity.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 04:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:16 am (UTC)I am seriously considering writing to both the org and the lead researcher on the process to cheerfully ask some more questions, but I imagine if they were willing to answer those questions honestly and in full it would be in the FAQ, so.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-06 01:14 am (UTC)If you have any questions about their process, I'll ask my friend!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-06 01:22 am (UTC)Dust Maker! New Life Chamber!! Essence!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-23 02:22 am (UTC)Yeah, right! Because everyone wants a second-hand heart valve.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-07 01:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-07 03:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-07 03:22 pm (UTC)Thank you for the more details on process. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 05:05 am (UTC)I mean, after the disaster they're all 'we cannot possibly put all of the bodies into our system at once as it would overload so we will fire them all into the sun' and I'm like, then... wait? Most of those who died died of air loss, right? and are in vacuum? The bodies aren't going to decompose; they're flash-frozen, and you could send crews to try to locate any which aren't and get those frozen. Then shuffle them into the normal system over the course of years-- we know the system isn't static because people enter and leave the ships, tourists eat food, and so on. Yes, it would take decades to get everyone shuffled in, but honestly, it seems more culturally in-character than just firing all the dead into the sun? They never express that the dead have to be processed Right Away as a cultural value, it's just that that's how it happens to work best under their circumstances. I would have expected, at the least, significant debate about this.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 05:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 08:19 am (UTC)record of a spaceborn few upsets me so much in part because I did enjoy the structure and I did enjoy a lot of the worldbuilding and then. the central premise. was COMPLETELY BROKEN and it DIDN'T HAVE TO BE.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 11:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-07 03:24 pm (UTC)(In some ways I feel like I bounced off them similarly to how I bounced off The Goblin Emperor, and I still haven't quite grokked what it is people get out of either...)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 02:28 pm (UTC)(Also, that trans future is very limited and demonstrates admirably the concept that science fiction talks like the future but is very rooted in the days in which it is written.)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-06 02:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-07 03:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-06 02:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-06 02:40 am (UTC)Thank you so much for this
Date: 2020-08-11 09:55 pm (UTC)delicious deconstruction.
I bounced when I first met the crew and felt the author had been ticking "representation boxes." I don't want to read shredded wheat.
<rhetorical question>Why are negative/frustrated reviews so much fun to read?</rhetorical question>
Re: Thank you so much for this
Date: 2020-08-11 10:25 pm (UTC)I've actually been doing a bunch of thinking about why I find them so much easier to write than positive reviews!
Re: Thank you so much for this
Date: 2020-08-12 11:18 pm (UTC)It just occurs that when I rec something I adore, I want to my delight to be at least as eloquent as the book I've loved. And that's hard!