author – Page 3 – Triple Take

J’s Take on The Tomorrow Code by Brian Falkner

I’m going to venture into spoilers for The Tomorrow Code, but I’ll try to do this chronologically, so the big spoilers won’t come until near the middle or end of this review. I’ll warn you when we get there.

The story is essentially about three kids in New Zealand. Tane, his best friend since forever, Rebecca, and his older brother, called Fatboy. Tane and Rebecca are chatting about time travel and hit on the idea that all you really need is a receiver and you could get any messages that people from the future were sending back. So as you may guess, it doesn’t take them long to find these messages. Takes them a little longer to decode them.

At this point in the story, it’s okay. I like time travel stories and who doesn’t like a book with some good codes and cryptic messages in them? The style of the writing was what I’d characterize as very YA-y. By that I mean it tries to be a little clever, while treating the reader as a bit of an idiot. It’s hard to pick out a specific example, but this sort of captures it:

That may not have sounded like much, but it wasn’t very often that Rebecca thought that Tane had an interesting idea, so it was kind of an important day, if only for that reason.

Although, in hindsight, it was actually an important day for much bigger reasons than that.

I like my foreshadowing to be more subtle than that, but actually this quote illustrates another thing that started to bug me pretty quickly. Tane is a spineless, weak-willed jellyfish. (Which is ironic, considering what they end up fighting later.) ((See what I did there?)) Rebecca is super-smart when it comes to science and technical things. Supposedly. So when they start talking about time travel, she says things he doesn’t understand. He pretends he does. Not to boost his own ego or save face, but just so he doesn’t disrupt her flow of conversation and thought processes.

Apparently Rebecca is also a bit of an activist and goes on protest marches a lot. Tane goes with her. Not because he cares two whits about the protest. He doesn’t even take the time to learn what they’re protesting about. Just because she wants him to go. Look, there’s being supportive of a friend and doing things because they like to do them, and then there’s… being a spineless jellyfish. It’s not that he’s a martyr, because he doesn’t mope about saying how he doesn’t want to be there. He pretends he does. So that’s two cases of him lying to her and deceiving her just to… be friends with her? How has this friendship lasted since birth?

When his older brother asks her out and the two start dating, you can only cheer for them. It’s not like she should be going out with Tane! How much worse would he get about this all if he were actually her boyfriend? Ugh.

I thought, maybe, maybe, the author is just being a bit heavyhanded and this is a lesson Tane is supposed to learn by the end of the book. He’s supposed to grow and change and turn into his own person and not be pushed around by Rebecca (who doesn’t even realize she’s pushing him around, since he goes along with it so easily). This does not happen. Tane does get less annoying, but mostly because the story stops focusing so much on their relationship, not because he’s actually grown into a less annoying person.

So I’m digging on the codes for a little while. Rebecca whips up this program to analyze signals and whatnot. It’s reminding me a bit of that series of choose your own adventure type books that were all about programming in BASIC. It had the programs and you had to put them into your computer, and usually debug them or alter them in some way to fit the story. You were a secret agent who was also a kid and a computer whiz. Anyway, they were awesome. So a book that reminds me of those in some small way gets a little boost to my opinion of it.

That didn’t last long. Most of the codes are cryptic in a way the reader couldn’t ever figure out. Heck, most of them are cryptic in a way the characters couldn’t figure out. Which is just bad cryptozizing skills! These messages are meant for Tane and Rebecca, so they ought to be written so they can figure them out. Of course it doesn’t help that they are idiots.

What do you think this means?

202.27.216.195,GUEST,COMPTON1.

Yea, she’s writing a program in one chapter and completely stumped by this a little later. It’s Tane who eventually (eventually) figures it out, by harkening back to something they learned in school. LEARNED IN SCHOOL!!

This book was written in 2008, btw.

And that’s the most legible of messages, to the reader. The rest you can only figure out as the story progresses. Because they’re crap. If you’re going to shorten the word ‘bitmap’, why would you not use BMP? Why would you use BTMP? The theory in this book is that the messages have to be written to save as much bandwidth as possible. (They don’t call it bandwidth, but yea, essentially.) Why add a letter there? And not add a letter where it would make more sense to? On top of that, yea, there’s an actual bitmap sent through. If you’ve got the space to be sending an image, you’ve got the space to write a few complete words. Kthnx.

So now that the book has annoyed me on several fronts, and I was seriously thinking Forever War a more interesting read (until that ticked me off so so hard, but more on that in a later Nebula Project discussion), the book takes a 90-degree turn.

‘Book 2’ of the book, which is to say the next section of the book, shifted in tone. Suddenly things weren’t about time travel and codes and Tane being jealous of Fatboy without ever telling anyone, but about this bioterror threat and almost-dead 4-year olds. It got pretty serious and rather dark awfully fast.

There’s more action in the back half of the book. Boring action. I was skimming it, because I hate action scenes without any character or emotion really pushing it and backing it. It also wasn’t written very well, but that was par for the book. Not that it was bad writing. It was competent writing. It just didn’t read easily to me. It didn’t flow.

The action also stops centering around the three kids. There are suddenly a lot of scenes with adults as POV characters. Adults who weren’t even in the first part. Until the end we’re jumping between all sorts of different people, fighting battles, and just.. blah. I was glad when I finally finished it.

Not that the end didn’t suck.

Okay, now I need to talk about the spoilery bit. It’s two paragraphs in white font below. Highlight it to read it, if you don’t mind me ruining the Big Surprise. Otherwise skip down to the second set of –‘s.

—

So there’s this Chimaera Project, which is playing with viruses and trying to cure the common cold, essentially. But things go wrong. Very very wrong. It’s not a mutant virus getting out and killing everyone though, oh no. It’s the planet taking the opportunity to create ginormous antibodies and macrophages to seek out humans and destroy them. Oh, and they look like jellyfish and snowman. Because, of course they would. This is the perfect opportunity for a Maori lesson on treating the Earth respectfully and whatnot. And the soldiers get all upset at being told this, because they’re offended at being considered germs. Oookay.

Yea, no. Been there, read that. It wasn’t very well-executed in the book I read it in either. (I resist naming names, because it might be a spoiler for that book.) Plus however many movies and TV episodes involve being shrunk and injected into somebody’s body.

—

Now for some final, non-spoilery thoughts.

Tane was remarkably self-aware and sensitive to other people’s thoughts and emotions. Granted, mostly Rebecca’s. It struck me as ungenuine for a 14-year old boy. However, the author is male, so I’m not sure if I have a better grasp on what teen boys are capable of than he does. It’s like.. he knows he’s jealous and why. And even he even knows that his brother knows that he’s jealous. He knows all these things, he’s aware of all these things, and he still doesn’t say anything or act on them at all!! In contrast, Rebecca must be mostly oblivious, since she doesn’t seem to know (or perhaps to care?) that he’s not into protesting or that he doesn’t like her dating his brother.

In another situation, I might like Tane for that and think the book is a breath of fresh air. But Tane was that spineless jellyfish, so his insight just made that trait all the worse.

Some of the chapters have song snippets at the head of them, and near the end, the soldiers start singing a song. I felt like all the songs were ridiculous and out of place. Yellow submarine? Really? I feel like if you’re going to use quotes like this, they should be there for a good reason. Not because the song popped into your head while you were writing that chapter.

So, yea, redeeming qualities of the book are a smart girl character, the unusual (to me) setting of New Zealand, and the glimpses of Maori culture. If that’s a combination you’re looking for, go for it.

Tomorrow, When the War Began (John Marsden)

The Plot
It’s the summer holidays, Christmas is over, and Ellie and her friends are looking to have some fun before school starts again. A mixed group of boys and girls set out on a camping trip into the bush and are gone for several days. When they return home, things are not right: homes have been ransacked, parents are missing, and pets and other animals are dead. They soon discover, to their horror, that the country has been invaded and most of the town captured.

My Thoughts
I’ll begin by stating that I’ve never been a huge fan of the dystopian genre. It’s hard for me to explain exactly why: I’ve read many examples of this genre and even enjoyed them. They’re often very important books, which can serve to illustrate the slippery slope society is currently on, or could easily begin rolling down. But on a fundamental level they bother me. It’s not just that the excuse for the dystopian elements being introduced is often flimsy or poorly explained (but that is a big and common problem). It may be that I just don’t really want to think about the world being so disturbingly screwed up. Especially since much of the time these books don’t really provide any hint that conditions will improve for most people even after the heroes have done what they’re going to do.

That said, while Tomorrow, when the War Began shares many traits with books in the currently burgeoning Dystopian YA category, I’m not sure if I would put it there or not. My feeling is that in a typical example of the genre, you begin with the dystopic situation already well-established. Whatever events led to its creation may or may not be within living memory or even remembered at all. In either case it’s usually very entrenched by the time the reader and the hero arrives on the scene. That is not the case here. Ellie and her friends are typical rural Australian teens, living in or near a small town with their families. Their lives are normal (though pre-internet and cellphone, as this was originally written in the early 90s). They decide to have a camping trip into the bush to better enjoy the tail end of summer vacation before school starts up again, so a group of seven boys and girls head off to camp in an area even more remote than some of their family ranches. Author Marsden takes advantage of the camping interlude, which comprises the initial 20% of the book, to try and flesh out the characters as they are before circumstances will force them to change. His success there is only middling, as it’s difficult to establish the personalities of seven individuals in such a small space without resorting to stereotypes to fill in the blanks. Happily, he mostly avoids using such stereotypes as a crutch for most of them, with the exception perhaps of Fiona, who seems to me pretty much straight out of the rich-pretty-girl box.

The action gets started when our group of high schoolers returns from their camping trip to find something strange has happened. The family ranches which they arrive at first are abandoned, animals have been killed, the power is out, and there’s no hint as to where the people have gone. We have another instance of win here where the kids are appropriately creeped out and cautious as a result of these oddities, but not really ready to let themselves imagine what might have happened. (Though I did find it odd that none of them seemed to speculate about alien abduction. Is that just too ridiculous? But the situation was bizarre! If that’s not a time to let your imagination out, I don’t know when it is.) They soon conclude the area has been invaded by some outside aggressor, a conclusion which is confirmed when they find a fax sent by a parent waiting for them at one of the abandoned houses.

What I most enjoyed about the book at this point was that the ambitions of the characters matched their abilities and knowledge. They did not (spoilers!) put together an amazing plan to destroy the invaders; they did not hack into the national defense system and save the world; they did not even come up with an improbable and complicated plan to free all of the hostages being held at the camp in the town. They kept their goals small and attainable, and had a realistic amount of problems in executing them. They were upset, scared and tempted to try and run away from it all — and not at all positive that wouldn’t be the best course of action anyway.

That’s not to say it was perfect. Perhaps its biggest weakness was the treatment of the female versus the male characters. While everyone is portrayed as very competent and there’s no real arguing that the girls are going to be equal and equally effective partners in their resistance efforts, was it really necessary to have the only two characters to have a dramatic mental breakdown be female? I don’t think it would have affected the story at all if, say, Kevin had been the one to see his home destroyed and had gone hysterical as a result. That it was Corrie instead just undercut the generally positive portrayal of girls in the book.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on the truly appalling cover art on the edition of the book which I read. It is hideous. If I had picked this book up off the shelf in the bookstore, intrigued by the title, I would most likely have put it right back down after seeing this bizarro picture on the front. Fortunately, more recent editions have come out with a much more modern, appealing set of covers.

In Short
Tomorrow, when the War Began is a solid entry in the genre of YA speculative fiction with a dystopian bent. It also scores well on gender equality, though there were a few bits here and there along those lines that troubled me. It would work well enough as a standalone book, but it very clearly leaves so many threads unresolved that it’s a good thing the series continued. Even though the topic isn’t exactly my cup of tea, I may find myself tracking down the rest to find out how it all turns out.

Little House: Laura’s Early Years (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

With the exception of Farmer Boy, the original Little House books all have Laura Ingalls as the main character. Though the books themselves follow her as a child all the way to the first years of her marriage, there’s a time jump* between the third Laura book, On the Banks of Plum Creek and the fourth, By the Shores of Silver Lake. The existence of this gap means it makes sense to me to break the series there and have a look at the first three books together.

The Plot
In Little House in the Big Woods we’re introduced to the Ingalls family – Ma, Pa and their daughters Mary, Laura and Carrie. They live in a tiny cabin in the midst of a forest that’s pretty much on the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. The family isn’t wealthy, but they’re able to live well enough off the land – both theirs and the unclaimed areas of the forest. But soon enough, Pa is beginning to feel the forest is oversettled, and the whole family moves to Indian Territory in Little House on the Prairie. Pa believes the Native American tribes will soon be forced to give up this land (as do quite a number of others) and he and the family set up a farm just inside the disputed border. When he hears a rumor that soldiers will be coming to displace the settlers, he angrily packs the family up and they depart for Minnesota, where they settle during On the Banks of Plum Creek. Relatively close to a town for the first time, Laura and Mary are finally able to attend school, while Pa once again takes a stab at building a farm.

My Thoughts
These first three Laura books cover the period when she was about age 4 until 9 or 10, and follow the Ingalls family as they live at three different locations. We begin in Wisconsin, where the family is living in a small cabin in a forested area near the town of Pepin. The cabin is tiny, and life surely wasn’t quite as rosy as the picture Wilder paints, but even if the depiction of her childhood is romanticized, it’s still engrossing in a way that’s hard to explain.

We’re introduced here to the family: Pa, Ma, older sister Mary, Laura, and baby Carrie. Pa is a bit of a jack of all trades – he farms just enough to provide food for the winter, but obviously much prefers the variety of hunting and trapping with occasional other projects to the steady monotony of farming. Ma supervises the children and the food as well as performing numerous other important tasks around the homestead. Mary and Laura assist Ma with her work and Pa as needed; as with the Wilders in Farmer Boy, gender roles are enforced to a point, but if work needs to be done, then whoever can do it will be required to help out.

Compared to the industrious Wilders in Farmer Boy, the Ingalls family is positively idle. Which is not to say they aren’t constantly working, but without a large farm to take care of, the daily tasks of taking care of the stock and the garden are much less labor intensive. Pa spends a great deal of time tramping through the woods — hunting and trapping and fishing to be sure, but also enjoying himself while doing it. Ma certainly knits and sews, but it’s not clear that she has the materials for the sort of spinning and weaving that Mrs. Wilder was able to do. Interestingly, Ma, a former schoolteacher, does not really seem to press academic lessons very hard on Mary or Laura; both girls seem to have lots of free time in which to play.

But it’s not so much the plot or even the characters which make these books so fascinating. As I mentioned in my comments on Farmer Boy, it’s the details that drive my interest. Wilder was aware she was writing about a way of living already foreign to most of her readers, who had grown up with automobiles and the A&P. She took the time to describe the process of how things worked — from the perspective of a child — and include interesting details that just captured the imagination. If someone confronted me with a roasted pig tail I would probably recoil, but reading about Laura and Mary’s delight in the treat makes me want one: it sounds absolutely delicious.

The drawback to the weight given to process detail, and the fairly episodic nature of these early books means that the characters themselves are not deeply drawn. Ma is quiet and efficient, Mary is good and ladylike, Pa is mischievous and a good provider, Carrie is a baby, and Laura is restless and naughty. Part of this is, I think, because the Ingalls children themselves are so young in these books, it would be difficult to draw a more nuanced portrait of Ma and Pa while still retaining Laura’s perspective. And part of this is because they are meant to be idealized versions of the Ingalls family. Living in a tiny shack in the woods of Wisconsin cannot have been an easy life, no matter how rosy a picture Wilder tries to paint, but to start with real hardships are pretty much glossed over: everyone is well-fed, warm, and comfortable, even if they don’t have lots of possessions.

By the time we reach Plum Creek, the girls are starting to grow older and are more aware of their own lack of wealth relative to others around them. Nellie Olson appears on the scene for the first time, providing a sharp contrast to the Ingalls household with her heaps of toys and dresses, furniture and books. Something I didn’t pick up on reading as a child, but which comes through clearly now, is Charles Ingalls’s restless and somewhat irresponsible nature. His move to Kansas may have been well-considered, but to leave in what amounted to a fit of pique was truly shocking, and his decision for the family to settle near Plum Creek was poorly researched to say the least. Surely the fact that the man he bought the land from was so eager to get out of Dodge should have given him a clue? (Hint: When the oldtimers are talking about “grasshopper weather”, ask them what they mean!) And then he falls victim to easy credit, building a house without any actual money to pay for it. I’m left with the feeling that if he were alive today, his mortgage would be underwater and he’d be up to his eyeballs in credit card debt in spite of his ideals of self-reliance.

And I can’t much speak for Caroline Ingalls either. Though she is obviously part of the decision which brings the family to Plum Creek, because of the proximity to a school for the girls, she seems in no hurry to actually send them — she keeps them home most of the first year they live there, for no good reason. As a child, I never noticed it, but it does seem odd to me that the very clever daughter of this ex-schoolteacher heads to school around age eight just barely knowing her alphabet. Especially when Mary can apparently read? I am not sure what was going on there.

But none of these were things I noticed when I read them long ago, and even seeing them now and knowing more about the real Ingalls family and how they differ from the book version doesn’t take away from the charm of these books. It’s easy to see why they’ve inspired such a fandom as they have.

*Recently, the author Cynthia Rylant has attempted to bridge the gap by writing a midquel, Old Town in the Green Groves to cover this missing period, a book I’ve not yet decided upon reading.

In Short
The first three Laura-focused books in the Little House series covers a span of five or six years in Laura’s life, during which her family moved several times to radically different locales. Wilder describes their lives in each location, dwelling on interesting incidents and pulling these anecdotes together into an idealized portrait of her early life. Though reading them as an adult allows one to pick up on undercurrents that a child probably wouldn’t notice, nothing detracts from their charm and interest. These are books I will and have read again and again.

Nebula Project: The Dispossessed

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

Physicist Shevek leaves his homeworld to join physicist colleagues on the planet his people abandoned generations ago. The Urrastian’s aggressively capitalistic and gender-segregated society is quite a change from the anarchism/non-authoritarian communism practiced on Annares, his home. At home, no one owns anything, people live in dorms, and share in either prosperity or lack. Though some are starting to wonder if they really are as free as they believe. Shevek is determined to share his breakthroughs with the known universe, and he’s not sure either Annares or Urras will permit him to do it.

K: This time our Nebula winner is The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, who by 1974 had won the Nebula for best novel twice — and was the only woman to have yet won it at all.

J: Don’t worry. The book is still about a guy. It’s not full of girl cooties.

K: At least there are women. Well, sort of. But we’ll get to that in a bit. The Dispossessed takes place in the same universe as Left Hand of Darkness, though it tells a story from an earlier time period and from a different planet.

J: Sort of the same theme though. We learn about two different societies. One of them from an outsider’s point of view, though the other from an insider’s point of view.

K: Right. Quite a lot of these early Nebula winners have been more what I would deem ‘thought experiments’ than books with a real plot. The author has an idea and works up some characters in order to better describe their idea. Sometimes the characters suck (Ringworld) sometimes they’re bland (Rendezvous with Rama) and sometimes they’re okay. I found that The Dispossessed‘s characters fell into the realm of okay.

J: This is at least my third time reading the book. It was popular in my college classes for some reason. I wouldn’t say a lot of the details.. well, any of the details really stuck with me. Or the characters. I had a vague memory of the main character and that’s it. I like this book okay, but I wouldn’t put it in my top five favorite Le Guin books. Sometimes I found it interesting and sometimes I found it dull. Never a hard slog, but I wasn’t breathless waiting to read more of it.

K: I definitely preferred it to Left Hand which is the only other LeGuin I have to compare to. Maybe because the situation was just slightly more believable? It was still stretching the bounds of my suspension of disbelief, but it worked better for me than the whole develop a gender thing.

J: I’ve already forgotten his name.. was it Shevek? Did you feel his society, his world, and all was kind of.. blah? Sort of like, there was no tension, no drama. It didn’t feel real or human.

K: I didn’t feel like there was no tension exactly. I felt like they were all fooling themselves (something which they came to realize themselves, at least Shevek and his compatriots). But it was all too polite. It was like they were brainwashed. I just can’t imagine a society where uniformly there seems to be -no- one who flips out that their significant other is sent away from them on pretty flimsy context. But I guess that was kind of the point, to imagine a society where somehow that was true. But it doesn’t make it particularly realistic to me.

J: Maybe it just seemed like all their emotions were muted, yea. People got.. annoyed, or depressed. But not much else.

K: Yeah. They never seemed to get mad. How is that even possible? People get angry. All the time! It’s like Vulcans except they aren’t particularly logical.

J: And I wonder if they’re supposed to care about the children at all. That scene when Shevek was a toddler, he and the other kid both had full diapers. Like they’d been neglected, even though there was someone watching them. Was that supposed to show that society doesn’t care about individuals, just itself?

K: I’m not sure. Obviously part of the… indoctrination… is to remove the children from their parents to weaken the attachment there. And then to make everyone think it’s their own idea and for the best. I don’t think there was any intent to suggest they were physically neglected. It might have just been a detail.

J: I dunno. It just struck me that it was both of them and not just one. There was much to the society to recommend it. I’d love to work on whatever I wanted. Even if it meant doing some of the grunt work sometimes. Although I wonder if I would’ve turned into one of the hermits. Dunno if I could take living in a dorm all the time.

K: It certainly struck me as a society that on its surface seems like a haven for introverts, in reality would probably suck for them a lot. To not really be able to have a space to call your -own-… ugh. Nightmare.

J: And nobody complained about the food! The whole point of a cafeteria is to complain about the food! Actually I was a little surprised they had art in any form. Considering Rite of Passage, where they couldn’t make art anymore. The establishment had a stranglehold on what type of art, and you couldn’t do a lot of personal, individual type art, but art still existed and was still being made. By that I include plays, music, etc, of course.

K: It did sound like art for art’s sake was discouraged – not ‘functional’ exactly, even if it did feed an emotional need. Part of the problem was the subsistence nature of life on Anarres. Would they have been able to keep up the facade of their communist living if there was more time for leisure and less hardship? I’m thinking the cracks would have shown sooner — LeGuin did give the society a great deal of thought, really. She probably came closest to the circumstances in which anything like that could actually work.

J: She definitely does seem to fit the environment to the society. Like in Left Hand. Or rather fit the society to the environment. What I was rather surprised by was how much physics was in the book. I hadn’t remembered that at all.

K: Except there was no physics in the book, of course. I did like the idea that this other society came at physics from such a completely different mindset that they discovered and described the universe in a way totally unrecognizable to Terrans — and yet equally valid.

J: Well, to someone who never studied physics, it sounded like physics. Even if it was technically more a.. philosophy of physics? With a little Terran history of physics thrown in. I did find it interesting that this book is the creation of the ansible. I didn’t remember that.

K: I didn’t know LeGuin had coined the term, but we all know how lacking my background in classic sf is, so it’s hardly surprising. I did like that we saw the creation of such an important device — and that it really wasn’t telegraphed at the beginning that that’s what was going to happen.

J: Yea. I just assumed it already existed, if it was going to be mentioned at all.

K: It does help to place this book in the timeline of the other Hainish series. Since LeGuin hasn’t done anything as helpful (at least from my perspective) as include a timeline or stardates or anything to otherwise indicate the internal chronology. It does help justify the book — certainly in a way that Left Hand was not justified — as important to the series as a whole rather than just another standaloneish book in the same universe.

J: I think trying to turn it into a ‘series’ or construct a timeline would drive you crazy. Since it wasn’t designed that way and I don’t even know if there’s much or any character crossover. Which at least reassures me, because it means I don’t have to worry about reading them in any sort of order. I just checked and she doesn’t have any more Hainish books on the Nebula list, so my next point about not having to read everything when we get to that is kind of nonexistent. But in /theory/ it would’ve been nice not to have to read the whole series to read her next winning book. Too bad her next winning book is Earthsea like 4 or 5 and those are in order, afaik.

K: Well, if a series is good, then it shouldn’t be a problem to read it all, right? But as I think we’ve already discovered, the Nebula does not necessarily reward ‘good’ as in ‘readable’ (supposedly that’s the Hugo but I have my doubts about THAT too). It rewards some other quality. In some cases that seems to have been imagination/vision/forward-thinkingness, but not universally. Which may make for award-winning science fiction of the sort you can easily pick apart in an academic setting, but isn’t always fun to read. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course.

K: Anyway, my opinion is the Hainish books are a series, since they take place in the same universe. But no, the fact that I read this one after Left Hand didn’t really affect things, because what I learned from that book did not inform me of anything in particular (beyond the mere existence of this loose alliance) that allowed me to have a deeper/better understanding of this book.

J: My reading of the Hainish books is scattershot. I’ve read a couple others, I think. And a bunch of short stories/novellas. I like them best when they’re dealing with gender stuff and family structures other than traditional American nuclear family. Which this one only sort of does. And not in a unique way. I feel like kids raised in dorms is seen in other places. Brave New World maybe? And others.

K: Kids raised in dorms isn’t especially unique at all, no. Rite of Passage has kids that move in and out of dorms, and parents that don’t necessarily live together for long stretches of time. In fact, the gender and family issues in this book were just barely formed to the point where they weren’t much more than stereotypes and assertions. There was no insight provided. The closest we came was the very very brief scene toward the end of the book (chronologically the middle of the story) where Shevek encounters his mother and some of the other characters realize that a good part of her antagonism toward them is rooted in her guilt for essentially abandoning him and his father when he was a toddler. She’s uneasy with her decision and must therefore defend the customs that allowed/required her to make the choice, or else it makes her confront the consequences of her actions.

J: Wow. That’s deep. I didn’t get that at all. I think I just read it as her being annoyed he wouldn’t let her reconnect with him as an adult. I did notice, and it bugged me, that for all Shevek said men and women could and would do any job, though might have a better affinity for something over another, both midwives mentioned were women. And Shevek is a ‘hard’ scientist while his non-wife is a ‘soft’ scientist. While Le Guin managed to put women in some positions of authority, the equality didn’t seem to permeate everywhere.

K: Getting back to your first point, I think that’s exactly what happened back when she visited him in the infirmary while he was sick. It was after that that she kind of needed this elaborate justification in her head.

K: I also totally agree with you on the women in science issue. I felt like even LeGuin noticed what she was doing and as a result threw in randomly that old lady physicist/mentor for Shevek. G-something. But then she undermined even that by having her be kind of useless and almost Alzheimer-y.

J: Yea. I mean in general it’s miles ahead of most of the other books we’ve been reading. But it just didn’t seem like it went far enough.

K: It didn’t, but I guess I’m feeling like it may be a case of a book can’t be all things at once. Unlike with Left Hand, the construction of gender did not seem to be a main theme in this book, so its poor showing could just be a result of her focus being elsewhere. Except. Except for the fact that pretty much the lone female Urrasti was so clearly meant as a contrast to the women on Anarres.

J: I’d forgotten her. She has this one line where she says if the Anarres women would just come on over and have a spa day, they’d love it. And when she mentioned shaving, I didn’t think about it until afterwards that she meant everywhere, since they shave their heads.

K: Yeah. I wasn’t quite sure what we were supposed to take away from the shaving. Or from her. We weren’t really given any other female Urrasti to compare her to — except, I guess, for Odo, whose rise as a political activist seems all the more surprising given how little visibility women seemed to have in their society. Unfortunately for LeGuin, as soon as we found out the women were bald, I started mentally trying to compare the Urrasti with the Centauri and since it was actually not a bad fit overall, I now don’t have a very clear view of them as presented in the book.

J: *laugh* You’ve been watching too much Babylon 5. As for me, I still have not gotten over the name Odo. I can’t blame Le Guin for it, but it was difficult to remember it was a woman. Not that I didn’t have that trouble with some of the other names, but those were because it was intentionally ambiguous.

J: But as for Shevek and that woman, I still don’t know what that attempted rape was all about. Yes, he was drunk. Yes, there was a culture clash. Yes, she was exuding sex and flirting with him. But, she said no. Several times. Women never said no to him before?

K: That baffled me too. In a culture where individual autonomy is supposed to be the last and only word, what was his confusion? She. Said. No. You can’t get any more clear than that. Are we supposed to take away from this that women on Anarres never say no? Just because sex is free and open doesn’t mean everyone wants to have it all the time and with anyone who asks!

J: Yea, exactly. And I hate to tell you, Shevek, but just because you prefer women doesn’t make you a confirmed heterosexual when you’ll hook up with guys just to reconfirm a friendship, or whatever! And I do get sick of gay characters who only get to have sex with the self-identified straight guys, but that’s another topic altogether.

K: Another section that baffled me! Shevek… didn’t really want to have sex with him, but he let him have a pity lay? How is that good for anyone?! But it’s clear that LeGuin was still working out some views on sexuality. We know that she later realized her statement in Left Hand that rape was impossible in that society was completely ridiculous. I have no evidence, but it could be that these would be things to ‘fix’ if the book were written now.

J: Maybe.. maybe. I wonder if she ever returned to these particular worlds. I’ll have to look that up.

K: So the one thing we haven’t really talked about is the structure of the book. The way it’s published is in alternating chapters — Chapter 2 chronologically begins the story, while Chapter 1 sort of picks up at a point in the middle (after the events of chapter 12). Once I realized that, I admit I -was- tempted to read it in the timeline order, but I resisted. I wonder if she wrote it the way it’s read, or if she wrote it straight through and then reorganized it. Do you have any idea?

J: Huh. No idea. It didn’t occur to me to even really think about it as a broken up timeline. I saw it clearly as odd chapters were one planet (well, or moon) and even chapters were the other. So that I guess I was reading the opposing chapters as all flashbacks from ‘now’.

K: I thought at first it was just a flashback, but when it continued and it was clear that chapter 4 followed chapter 2 and chapter 6 came after 4 — the typical flashback situation isn’t chronological, because it’s more like memory, meaning that something reminds you of when you were ten, and then later something reminds you of when you were eight, and then still later you remember college, etc. It was too organized, in other words.

J: For a novel, maybe. But if you take an episode of Highlander, for example, each flashback is telling a story of its own. So it’s not jumping around in time, well, at least not backwards. But in a way I was also reading it as alternating points of view, I think. They were both still Shevek.. well, except it was more omniscient at times.. but one was Shevek at home and one was Shevek out of his element.

K: Well, that’s true too, but clearly the Even Chapters were developing ‘Why Shevek Went to Urras’ and the Odd Chapters were showing ‘What Happened to Shevek on Urras’, so if you did read the Evens first and then the Odd, you’d get the whole story in order.

J: I wasn’t arguing against that. That’s just not how I saw it.

K: That’s fine.

J: So, no more Le Guin for another 15 years. I am glad we’re finally into years where I was actually alive though. It no longer feels so much like ancient history.

K: Speak for yourself! I’m still not born yet. Almost there, though.

Hallowed Murder by Ellen Hart

From the back cover:
The police call Allison’s drowning a suicide, but her housemates at her University of Minnesota sorority insist it was murder. That’s when alumnae advisor Jane Lawless steps in to find out the truth.

Abetted by her irrepressible sidekick Cordelia, Jane searches for clues, and what she finds is as chilling as the Minnesota winterâ€”for in those icy drifts, at a lonely vacation house, she risks everything to ensnare a cunning killer…

Review:
Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless has volunteered to serve as an alumnae advisor for her former sorrority, Kappa Alpha Sigma. One morning, while out exercising with her reluctant friend, Cordelia Thorn, Jane discovers the body of one of the girls, Allison Lord. When the local police are quick to dismiss Allison’s death as suicide (which they attribute to confusion over her sexuality), Jane decides to do a little investigating of her own, eventually concluding that she’ll need to set herself up as bait to catch the killer.

I didn’t outright dislike Hallowed Murder, but it does have some major problems. Most significant is the fact that the culprit is not a surprise, thanks to a brief opening chapter that reveals their motive. Other aspects of the mystery are less transparent, though, and Hart at least managed to make me briefly suspect other characters. Speaking of the characters…. Jane is okay, and I like the aura of sadness that clings to her after the death of her long-time partner, Christine, but her friend Cordelia seems to have just one modeâ€”obnoxious. Jane’s brother makes a couple brief appearances, but he is utterly insubstantial. Then there are the victim’s three closest friends, one of whom we scarcely meet before she apparently drops out of the sorority off-camera. Again, it’s not exactly bad, but it’s all quite superficial.

The same can be said of Hart’s writing style. As I look now at the quotes I jotted down, they don’t look so objectionable, but while I was reading they were jarringly simplistic. Too much tell, not enough show. Here are a couple of examples:

The early morning mist had settled around the base of the old bridge, making it appear to float above the water. It looked like a stage set. A perfect setting for a murder. Cordelia shuddered at her own morbidity.

Jane looked around at the young man taking notes. She had never been interrogated by the police before and did not like her words being cast in stone on some stenographer’s pad.

That second one could’ve been â€œJane looked uneasily at the young man taking notes,â€ and it would’ve communicated all of that without seeming so… prim. This was a common problem, with dialogue and character thoughts frequently coming across as stiff and unnatural. Characters were also exceedingly forthcoming with their prejudices. Now, true, this was published in 1989, so perhaps open homophobia was more common, but characters with these opinions don’t even try to disguise them, and generally have no other positive attributes that would make them more three-dimensionalâ€”they’re just being used as ignorant mouthpieces. Here’s a quote from Susan Julian, another sorority advisor, after she learns about Allison’s sexual preference:

Having allowed aâ€”I even hate to say the wordâ€”lesbian in our midst would destroy our reputation. We can only hope it doesn’t make the papers. I mean, no one would feel safe joining.

I haven’t yet decided whether to read Vital Lies, the second Jane Lawless mystery. The excerpt included in the back of my paperback was not very promising, but some mystery writers do improve over time. And, of course, Hart earns bonus points for managing to mention both Richard III and Doctor Who.