doubletake – Page 2 – Triple Take

Nebula Project: Ringworld

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Ringworld. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

On his 200th birthday, Louis Wu is recruited by an alien to join an expedition to an unknown destination. The reward is the plans for a spaceship drive beyond anything the human race has yet invented. He and the other recruits soon discover their destination is Ringworld, a sort of modified Dyson sphere which consists of a single ring spinning around a sun. Louis, his girltoy, and two aliens soon crash into Ringworld and must try to discover just what it is, who made it, and how they can escape.

K: Up for discussion is Ringworld by Larry Niven, winner of the 1970 Nebula award. This book was also apparently popular enough to spawn a franchise, but I think before we even get into discussing the plot or the details, we have to start by looking at the massive massive genderfail/misogyny that pervades this entire novel.

K: I was so astounded by it that I really am not sure where to begin.

J: This is another one of the books I’d actually read before. This one I believe I read in junior high, maybe early high school, when I was just blowing through things in the SF section of the local library. My memory of it was really limited to ‘hard science fiction, some aliens, a ringworld, boring’. So it surprised me when it was actually readable. But I also hadn’t remembered there being women in it! Or.. women-like objects, more accurately.

K: Yes, that’s really a perfect description. They certainly weren’t fully realized characters with agency or any sort of purpose. In fact, the “main” female character in the book, Teela Brown — it seems in the end her entire reason for being in the book was her complete -lack- of agency. Things just happened to her (and thus to our far more important male or apparently-male characters) without her knowledge, consent or even interest. Now, given that she was a completely rubbish female character to begin with, apparently on the trip because our protagonist couldn’t go without sex for a couple months without being tempted to rape one of his alien male companions (Oh yes, very funny joke, Larry Niven. Ha ha.). She has no training, no brains, no abilities beyond spreading her legs.

[At least I never slept with Prince Adam.]

J: But occasionally surprises the main character with how smart she is! At infrequent times. And just when she disappears, (and he thinks she’s dead), another woman comes in to have sex with him. Because we wouldn’t want him to go without.

K: The magic hooker with the unpronouncable name! Does she have a heart of gold? I’m not sure we actually saw enough of her to decide, but I’m leaning toward yes. At least the hooker was apparently a few hundred years old, a far more appropriate age for our 200 year old “hero” than a 20 year old ingenue whose great-grandmother he slept with. There’s no other way to describe that situation except gross.

J: And if their whole characterization wasn’t enough, he also goes and sells whatshername the first girl to the Ringworld guy! Rather than, you know, convince him that he doesn’t own her. Just.. oh, it’s easier if I sell you to him. ‘Okay!’

K: I was completely baffled by that. Now, we do have some evidence (see: magic hooker) that the Ringworld society wasn’t exactly egalitarian prior to the collapse of civilization. But it’s extremely telling that Niven’s take on the collapse of even an unequal civilization is that their first step is to make women literal property. Why? Seriously, why? He doesn’t even attempt to dress it up with the idea of a dowry or a bride-price, or explain why, and no one questions it. It’s just: ‘oh, women are slaves? Ok, well, here, let me sell you to him’.

J: Oh, he makes a lot of leaps without any good explanation to back them up. (‘He’ being kind of both Niven and the main character here.) Oh, no metal to mine, so clearly civilization cannot re-emerge. There’s bacteria in your gut! It could mutate! (And there was no other bacteria anywhere? Not.) You’re lucky, therefore you have no free will. Nessus might be male and take a female mate, or he might be female and take a male mate, or he might be male and take a male mate. But never once does it cross his mind that they might both be female.

K: Yes, let’s talk about the aliens for a bit. We have three species represented here, if we don’t count the Ringworlders as a fourth. And apparently Niven gets props from many for coming up with detailed and very different alien societies. I can see that to a certain extent, but once again his big issue is gender relations. Nessus (the puppeteer) implies that reproduction for his species requires three. Okay, fine. Except that one of the three involved is ‘property’ and nonsentient. Er, okay, fine. I don’t like that, but if you want to have a species where that is the case I can see how it might be interesting to explore. Not that it is explored or anyone comments upon it. Because ha ha, silly us, our other alien species, the catlike Kzin, -also- have a second sex which is nonsentient. And in both cases, as far as the reader is concerned, we are told that the aliens we see are analagous to males, implying (or in the case of the Kzin, flat out stating) that the nonsentient sex is the female one.

K: Once is interesting, twice is a trend. And given the fact that Niven made no effort to then contrast the human race with these aliens by making the human females dynamic, intelligent and interesting, it just smacks of a lack of interest in portraying females at all. The only reason the human females weren’t completely nonsentient is because obviously everyone knows that’s not the case. (Though apparently they aren’t quite up to male standards either.)

J: It’s bizarre too. Because Nessus says their only options to not breed are surgery or abstinence. I mean.. couldn’t you have sex with one person and not the both required? Not that we have any clue how any of it is accomplished. Because while he doesn’t shy away from nice human hetero sex scenes, he’s extremely vague about the aliens. And you’re right that we’re supposed to surmise that the nonsentient puppeteer is female, because Louis doesn’t ever imagine otherwise. Like if he had thought Nessus and the Hindmost both female, he would’ve had to imagine the nonsentient one as male and he couldn’t do that. And if both of those races are used to females being nonsentient, they should’ve been treating whatshername (I keep wanting to call her Trillian, for reasons I can get into later.) like crap. And Louis should’ve been all ‘What’re you doing, guys? She’s as sentient as me.’

J: Not that I want Nessus or the Hindmost to actually be female! Because /then/ we get the characterization of kzinti as male and warlike and fierce and strong. And the puppeteers as female and cowards and manipulators.

K: I didn’t entirely get the problem with the puppeteers and breeding. Nessus also says that abstinence causes its own problems and remarks that no race can go without sex for very long without it causing issues. And after he said that, I waited for Louis to contradict him, since humans have long practiced a lifetime of celibacy with no issues at all. Except he didn’t. Instead, Louis decides he may as well agree to bring along a completely unqualified 20 year old, since she’s eager to bed him and then he won’t have to be deprived. He even reflects on how stupid he was in the past for going on his solo ‘sabbaticals’ without taking along a woman in stasis he can wake up whenever he gets the urge.

J: Gah, yea. I’d forgotten he’d thought that. Like the human race wouldn’t have developed a very nice realistic sex doll he could’ve brought instead. The doll could’ve seemed just as sentient as he wanted. Which I’m guessing is not very. Was there also something in here about men only being able to reproduce until they’re in their 40s or 50s? Showing a clear lack of understanding of human reproduction!

K: There was indeed, though I think it was 50s or 60s. In any case, I can’t explain it, since even in 1970 I can hardly believe anyone thought that was true, since there were countless examples of it being untrue.

J: If the boosterspice made you sterile after you used it once or a few times, then sure, but.. that’s not stated.

K: Because that might confuse people into thinking our virile hero is impotent somehow! When of course he’s not. Every woman ever wants to sleep with Louis Wu. Though it’s never exactly explained why.

J: Why was he randomly called by his full name here and there? I can’t take his full name seriously in any case. After the titles of the first two chapters, I couldn’t take anything seriously! Which is when my mind started going down the Hitchhiker’s path. For those playing along at home, the first two chapters are: Chapter 1 – Louis Wu | Chapter 2 – And His Motley Crew

K: Ha! I did not actually notice that at all. Anyhow, I started equating Teela to Trillian fairly early on, but then gave it up. As underused and underdeveloped as Trillian is, she’s an astrophysicist, beautiful -and- smart. At least in the books. Teela is just a scream machine, someone for Louis to shake his head at, who conveniently disappears for the last third of the book so they can solve the problem of how to get out of the Ringworld.

J: Oh, Teela gets to be part Trillian and part Heart of Gold.. speaking of women with a heart of gold. :> And then we had a two-headed alien. So I really started to wonder how much Douglas Adams was using Ringworld to riff off of.

K: That is actually a good question. One which I’m not qualified to answer, but I can’t imagine it wasn’t something he had read and was aware of when writing Hitchhiker’s.

J: Didn’t Arthur Dent also meet Trillian at a party? But anyway.. the other reason I couldn’t take Louis Wu seriously as a name is that he was trying too hard to be Chinese without being Chinese. It was.. well, weird, but also racist. We first meet him he’s altered his true appearance and wearing clothes to make him nothing but a caricature of what a Chinese man is supposed to look like. Dressed up for his party? Or does he always present himself that way except when he’s off exploring ringworlds?

K: From the very brief introduction we have to current Earth society before we leave the planet, it sounds to me like extensive costuming and colorizing is typical of the present society. Teela, for instance, looks not at all like her presented appearance at the party. I do wonder why this seems to be a relatively common future trope (we last encountered it to this extent in Babel-17) — but maybe I’m just out of touch, since I do not like jewelry, perfumes make me ill, and I have way better ways to spend my money and time than worrying about cosmetics. I guess if modification was easy and cheap I might well use it to remove some weight.

J: The book that comes to mind is Westerfeld’s Uglies series. I think when a society is decadent and bored, they supposedly start playing with cosmetics, clothing, accessories, etc. If it was cheap and relatively safe and painless, I might do a few things. But why look like a boring old stereotype of a Chinese man? At least try to look like someone in particular, or be, y’know, different. Horns, wings, fur. Or if you felt that ideally reflected the you inside, then.. why remove it all to make a space trip?

K: I wasn’t entirely sure about that either, except that they weren’t going to be able to bring their cosmetics with them on the trip, and I’m sure real astronauts aren’t allowed to wear such things(?), so perhaps it’s something he included without even thinking about it.

J: Hrm. Maybe.

K: Now, the technology was interesting. Aside from the various poorly explained youth serums (the boosterspice, and then the Ringworld equivalent which somehow gave you ’50 years of youth’ per dose.) We have the transporter booths, the puppeteer equivalent, moving sidewalks — and then Louis mentions using a typewriter. What?

J: Did he? I don’t remember that. What kind of threw me was ‘intercom’ also including video. Since to me ‘intercom’ is very specific. Unlike ‘comm’, which I take more generally, to cover a wide range of possibilities.

K: Video intercom isn’t unheard of, so that didn’t really pop out at me. And I had to laugh at the moving sidewalks (slidewalks!) because really, that idea is so impractical. They can’t even keep the elevators working in subway stations. They can’t even properly plow the sidewalks we have. Can you imagine municipalities trying to keep miles of conveyor belts working? Outside? And yet… it’s such a popular idea. Like flying cars.

J: Bunch of lazy people. :) That reminds me though.. that he thinks teleporters will homogenize the planet. Moreso than television or other communications technologies. Like there wouldn’t be a backlash against, say, the Louvre being turned into a Walmart.

K: Yeah, it’s pretty clear now that increased communication and consumerism is what’s going to homogenize the planet. Transportation may come later but it’s not going to be at all essential.

J: If anything, it may have the opposite effect. If I can teleport anywhere I want, am I going to go to Dunkin Donuts? No. I’ll go to whoever I think is the best donut place on the planet. The number of Dunkin Donuts then won’t be based on ‘well, the closest one is a mile from here’, but on how many are needed to keep up with demand.

K: That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s very true. We put up with a lot of mediocre stuff because of convenience, but this would really change the nature of convenience in a fundamental way.

J: There is just so much in here I wish Niven had been concerned with exploring instead of the stupid Ringworld. What’s Earth like? What are the colonies like? What are the alien societies like? Not that I want to read the other books to find out. I think they’d just tick me off.

K: And there’s no real guarantee that they focus on the information you want. I think here again, he got interested in the idea of a Dyson sphere and wanted to figure out how to improve it. I can’t fault him for the thought experiment. It’s just the execution which is so unfortunate, because it completely takes away from the fact that the idea of a ‘ringworld’ is actually interesting. But he didn’t really explore that either, because as soon as we get there our characters are mostly trying to escape!

J: And I’m still confused why the place is full of humans. The explanation is supposed to be that the people who made the ringworld also wandered by Earth and half-heartedly terraformed it, brought some chimps and Neanderthals with them and.. what? We evolved from those Neanderthals or we descended from the ringworld engineers? And where do the dinosaurs come into it?

K: I suspect the history may be better fleshed out in future books, but yes, the impression I got was that Niven was saying we were somehow evolved from the pets of the Ringworld humans. So we were distantly related to them, but not -them-. I don’t know where the dinosaurs come in.

J: And none of these other alien races had run into humans on any other planet other than the ones who wandered there from Earth? Only Earth humans managed to make a go of it.

K: Well, I think the Earth thing was somewhat meant to be speculation. Because really it doesn’t make a -whole- lot of sense. Earth is supposedly 200 light years away from Ringworld, and no one ever encountered these Ringworld humans before, so presumably most of their empire was away from ‘Known Space’ which is the area local to Earth, roughly 70 light years across according to the book. So the odds that Earth, so very distant, was really part of it? Dunno. It seemed like an awfully silly coincidence, but as it was never properly followed through with in this book I can’t say either way.

J: Also the arrogance. Oh, these people can’t fly the cities anymore. They think we’re gods. So they’re uncivilized and backwards and barbarians and such a shame their civilization fell.

K: Shoddy reasoning was all over the place. There are lots of leaps of logic that are only barely supported by the available facts (ex: the whole Earth terraforming business). Like, they all happily conclude that people invented the floating cities before the development of the life extending serum, because people who don’t live long lives are more likely to be reckless with the life that they have. Um, what?

J: Yea, bizarre. And how is living in a floating city any less safe than flying around on cycles or in spaceships? When it comes to the luck thing, I could buy that a very lucky person would be reckless and careless. I couldn’t buy that she couldn’t empathize with people. That ‘I’m blind’, ‘But can you /see/?’ thing was just weird. And why would her luck have to drag her all the way to the ringworld to teach her how to uh.. be in pain? She couldn’t burn her feet on Earth? And I refuse, I refuse to believe this guy who now /owns/ her is the best possible person in the world for her and isn’t she so ‘lucky’ to have been united with him.

K: Niven (through Louis) flat out questions her humanity at several points in the book. I found it fairly hard to believe she was -that- distanced from the normal human experience. And yes, I strongly object to the manner in which she was disposed of by finding that random dude and then… randomly sleeping with him. And even more randomly being sold to him. The whole subplot of Teela’s luck was just weird and confusing.

J: And he’s really old. So she hasn’t even traded in for a man closer to her own age. :P

K: After reading this, I have to wonder why this universe became such a favorite that it spawned so many sequels, prequels and spinoffs. There is so little to recommend it. The basic idea– I’m just not sure how you can rescue it from all of the fail.

J: I don’t know.. the only redeeming quality I can see is that the two aliens were interesting. Although not entirely well-rounded.

K: They aliens were interesting, sort of. The puppeteer moreso than the Kzin. I have a prejudice against cat aliens.

J: I didn’t really read him as a cat. Even though he did say kittens at one point, I think. I guess I pictured more that big Looney Tunes monster. Whose name Google now informs me is Gossamer.

K: I can’t say whether or not I would have immediately read him as a cat, though I’m sure that his felinity was mentioned. But really I spent the better part of the 90s seeing those Man-Kzin War books being promoted at the bookstore when I went in to buy something else, so I have the cover images burned into my brain.

J: Ah. Well, I don’t have trouble with cat aliens per se. They do seem to be all over the place though.

J: Maybe you can explain something to me. It’s probably physics. So at the end, they pull the ship up the mountain and it’ll go down the hole in the middle and out into space, yea? It that because centripetal force is going to erm.. propel them that way? And then what’re they doing? Hanging out in space? I just.. why couldn’t they just take off again? Why did they have to go ‘down’ and through the hull?
s/It/Is

K: The problem was, to put this in the terms of technobabble from other series, all their impulse engines were burned up by the sun, but their hyperdrive was contained within the hull rather than fastened outside of it. So the only way they could move was by turning on the hyperdrive, which would have caused massive destruction if they tried to do it inside the ring instead of out of it. Now, I don’t recall an explanation for how the hyperdrive worked, but presumably it works on the same basic principle as most FTL drives and warps local space allowing the ship to escape Einsteinian space and enter a dimension where the speed limit isn’t the speed of light. Doing this on top of a planet or planet-like structure is probably a very bad idea.

J: I was just trying to picture a bunch of different alternative escape plans. But I couldn’t think of one that’d work. So I guess I get it now. And they must’ve landed near the one spot they could escape through because Teela was lucky and it was in her best interests to get Louis as far away from her as possible.

K: Hahaha. Yeah, that must be it.

Nebula Project: The Left Hand of Darkness

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Left Hand of Darkness. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things. This discussion also veered briefly into the sensitive topics of rape and sexual assault.

First Mobile Genly Ai is on the planet Gethen, otherwise known as Winter, to convince the inhabitants to join the interplanetary Ekumen, for mutual benefit and exchange of ideas, etc. Coping with the harsh cold environment is the least of his problems, as he seems poorly equipped to deal with the planet’s governments and its people. The fact that they all exist in a non-gendered state most of the time, until they enter kemmer once a month when they can be come male or female, leaves him questioning his own masculinity.

K: So this month we have The Left Hand of Darkness, by our first female winner for best novel, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Is it Le Guin or LeGuin? I’ve seen it written both ways. On my copy it’s pretty consistently with a space.) And once again we have a book about which I knew little more than its title. In fact, for some reason I have a lot of trouble in my head with ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’. Perhaps because I’d read neither.

J: I’ve seen it mostly with a space, I think the space is the proper way. Which isn’t how I tend to type it automatically. The trouble I have is between The Left Hand of Darkness and Children of a Lesser God. Which they don’t even share a common word except ‘of’! As for me, this is another book that I’ve actually read before. In this case, at least twice, and for two different classes in college. Though I’d forgotten quite a lot.

K: The book is pretty much the tale of a ‘first contact’ mission by the interstellar alliance known as the Ekumen with a long lost group of humans. There’s some backstory, obviously, which isn’t really touched upon too much here, though I didn’t find it to hinder the understanding of the story.

J: Yea, I’m not sure how much her Hainish books really tie in to each other or rely on each other. I’ve read a few and they don’t seem to really need you to read the others. Of the ones I’ve read, they seem concerned primarily with introducing you, the reader, to a new society and world.

K: Which means that all we can use to judge the Ekumen by is their sole representative who has any sort of role in this book, an Earthling by the name of Genly Ai. Who I was disappointed to discover was a male, since his name said nothing to me. And who I was further disappointed to discover is something of a jackass.

J: And idiot. Don’t forget idiot. But I was surprised he was black. I didn’t remember that.

K: I was lucky the text kept reminding me at intervals, otherwise I would have forgotten. Not necessarily because I was assuming him to be white but because character descriptions just don’t stick in my head very well. I don’t usually picture characters that way in my head, like a movie.

J: Yea, there’s one part where he’s frostbitten and his face is grey and everything and a little bit beyond that I was reminded he was black and went back to reread that bit. Kind of wondering if she’d also forgotten. But I couldn’t find any evidence she had. I don’t even really picture real people in my dreams. I just sort of know they’re them. I think I’d suck as an artist, even if I had the technical skill.

J: How long did you think he was female for? Because I knew he was male going into it, so I didn’t have a surprise there.

K: It’s not so much that I thought he was female but that for the first part of the first chapter, it’s all told in strict first person with no reference to his gender at all. It’s not until one of the other characters calls him ‘Mr. Ai’ that I knew for sure. And I was sad.

J: I get sad when that happens too. It’s a disappointment when it’s not a female main character.

K: Yeah. And here we had not just a male main character, but one who felt to me as pretty misogynistic. He was constantly disparaging the Gethenians by comparing them to women.

J: Yea, I was disappointed in Earth. :P Get out into space and join the wider galactic community and you still haven’t solved your gender issues.

K: I did wonder if it wasn’t meant to be a symptom of sexual panic – he found the Gethenians oddly attractive and so he had to cast them as women or else the gayness ohnoes!

J: Maybe. Which ties in to one of my major disappointments with the book. No sex!!!

K: For a book that was so very much about talking about this weird sexual evolution of the Gethenians, yeah, there was no sex at all on camera. Almost everyone we actually encountered was strangely celibate.

J: Even when Estraven is in kemmer in the tent, it was never clear to me if ‘he’ had gone female or not.

K: No, it wasn’t. And it didn’t make a lot of sense either — they were traveling for 81 days. That’s not one kemmer, that’s like, three.

J: Yea, it was suspicious that it so happened to be like exactly 26 days into the trip. If she had just said, anywhere, that being in dothe or a hard trek across the ice on low supplies might delay it. Which seems perfectly reasonable, but we shouldn’t have to assume..

K: Since he didn’t seem to be in it right before the trip started. I don’t know. The whole kemmer business seemed biologically unlikely to me. I know the story hints that it may have been some sort of abandoned experiment by the ancients, but… I don’t know. It just seems… unlikely.

J: The plausibility or implausibility didn’t bother me.

K: It did me a bit. Because part of the book was about how the Gethenian sexual cycle — the fact that they were essentially asexual for large portions of the time — came to dominate their society and dictate their progress. Because apparently without sexual urges (the drive for men to impress women??) society progresses at a very slow rate and there’s no real ambition or progress.

K: Le Guin equates asexuality with passivity.

J: And no war.

J: Genly and the woman whose notes we get in one chapter aren’t clear on if the slow progress and lack of war are due to their lack of gender or to the environment of the planet. Do you think Le Guin was maybe being hedgy? Not coming right out and laying it all at the feet of gender.

K: I don’t know. I felt the society was pretty uneven: they’ve adapted very well to the cold, even invented super awesome batteries that anyone on Earth now would just kill for. But there’s no sense of industry or advancement, so where did these inventions come from? My experience in our society is that one invention leads pretty soon to another as other people have their ideas sparked by it, and it’s kind of like a snowball rolling down hill as long as there are materials and conditions that allow people to concentrate on inventing. And nothing we’re shown suggests to me that there -aren’t- these conditions, in spite of the difficulty of -travel-, they all seem to be pretty well set otherwise.

J: I think it’s a common theme in stories about all-female societies. Progress is slow or nonexistent and there’s no war. I don’t know what’s up with that! It’s easy to lay war on men, but I don’t believe they have a monopoly on it. Just like they shouldn’t have a monopoly on science, technology, invention, art!

K: No. I think those things might be -different-, but certainly not disappeared. Though I will note that one of the few things Genly can come up with to say about women when asked is that they aren’t usually scientists or inventors! Frankly, society isn’t yet at the point where we can say -what- the potential of women are in those areas, because I don’t think they’ll achieve that potential in the same -way- as males and there just isn’t the right kind of societal support for that yet.

J: Ah, was it him who said that? I knew I’d read it recently, but I’d filled my head with a couple other books and blog posts all around the same subject since I finished reading it. But we already decided Genly was an idiot and a jackass. Why they picked him to be First Mobile, I have no idea. If it were me, I would’ve picked someone intersex or genderqueer. Someone who’d have a chance of not being so gender-biased. And maybe someone who understood politics better. Unless this was all a test of Gethen. ‘Can you handle this guy who’s all caught up in being macho?’

K: It was he who said it. And it made me sad. It made me sad to remember that people were STILL saying the same thing 40 years later (I’m looking at you, Larry Summers) without understanding any better -why- that might be true. Now, as far as Genly’s fitness as First Mobile, I have no idea. Perhaps it was indeed a test of the Gethen. ‘If you don’t murder this dude, maybe you can join us.’

J: *laugh* Yea, sort of.. if you can handle us at our typical (or even sliding towards not-so-great), we’re good to go. But look at what that woman’s report said. “The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation.” And I’m like.. what? Um, no. Not that I don’t think I wouldn’t be surprised and caught off guard if I went to Gethen and was treated not as a woman, but as a person, but I don’t think I’d be bothered by it. My pride would not suffer. Though, really, wouldn’t they treat me like a pregnant woman? And that /would/ bother me!

K: Yeah. It was really that chapter and having a second character say something so idiotic that I knew that my excuses for Genly’s behavior really were just that, excuses, and it probably wasn’t a well-thought out effort on Le Guin’s part to make him that way on purpose to highlight how dumb it all was. Unless she’s trying to say all of human society is blinded by gender and never will manage to get over it. Ever. That’s just depressing.

J: Well, to some extent she probably picked a man with ‘typical’ 60s ideas on purpose. And it was radical only to make him black. That one chapter actually surprised me when it was revealed to be a woman. The whole book up until that point had been male. Even the Gethenians were ‘men’ and ‘he’. So to find it was written by a woman surprised me. I don’t know if it was meant to.

K: I wasn’t sure what to think of it. It seemed a token chapter in an otherwise nearly female-free book. What was its purpose? To show there were female scientists? To shock us with female scientists? To show us something about Ekumen society? Whatever it was I was puzzled.

J: I think.. to give us a female viewpoint of Gethenian society? By.. having her talk about sex. As an excuse for there being none?

K: I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I wonder if there had been sex (which by definition would not have exactly been straight) would the book still have won the Nebula? -Talking- about alternate sexualities and actually -showing- them are definitely not the same thing.

J: I think it would’ve counted as straight. The /relationship/ wouldn’t have been heterosexual, but the sex would’ve been.

K: In any case, it’s a moot point.

J: Well, to mention my other big disappointment with it, was that the male pronouns were continued throughout. It actually surprised me. That Genly would use them, okay. But Estraven? Bah! Estraven’s chapters all read more Earth human than I thought they should’ve.

K: Yes, that was odd. I guess we have to assume the Estraven entries were originally in Karhidish and they had a pronoun which we don’t, and the translation made it ‘he’, but the fact is they kept using Karhidish words like shifgrethor, so there was no reason they couldn’t have just used the proper pronoun.

J: And things like ‘man’ or ‘son’ which could’ve easily been ‘person’ or ‘child’. I know Le Guin has since stated that the one thing she’d change about the book is to use some gender neutral pronouns of some sort. And I wish they’d release a version like that.

K: Yeah, there was really no reason to be using man and son in the non-Genly chapters especially. I’m not usually a big fan of revisions in older books, but this one would actually improve things.

J: Well, an author revision.. where people could still read the old version if they wanted. And this wouldn’t be dumbing it down for the sake of kids, which a lot of them are. My favorite parts of the book are actually the folktales. Which are also male pronouns. Sigh.

K: Ahh yes the folktales. I didn’t dislike them, but their inclusion, and then the abrupt shift to Estraven’s POV in Chapter 6 did make me far more aware of the -structure- of this book than I normally am when reading. So I broke it down hoping to see some sort of pattern, but there wasn’t: Ai, Tale, Ai, Tale, Ai, Estraven, Science Chick, Ai, Tale, Ai, Estraven, Tale, Ai, Estraven, Ai, Estraven, Tale, Ai, Ai, Ai

J: During that long slog across the glacier, I wish there’d been more than one interruption with a folktale. Even if it was Estraven telling it to Genly while they were hanging out in the tent. I suspect the only pattern was ‘I need to tell people about this now, and this the best way to do it’.

K: Maybe so, though I do wish they had been more tied into the text if that was the case. If they really are just random infodumps, they may be creative, but they’re barely disguised.

J: I guess I mostly liked it because I knew the next chapter was likely to be different from the one I was reading. The whole story from Genly’s point of view would’ve been dull.

K: That is definitely true. And incomplete, since there were things going on of which he was not at all aware.

K: Though that comes back again to how unsuitable he seems to have been for the position of First Mobile.

J: Yup. I bet he wasn’t even from Iceland or Canada, which also would’ve made some sense.

K: Hmm. Now I feel like he said where on Earth he was from, but I can’t remember when he said it and skimming through I can’t find it.

J: I don’t remember him saying. Probably something stupid like Hawaii or the Sahara Desert.

J: Shall we talk about things with didn’t disappointment me, but annoyed me quite a lot instead?

J: Minor annoyance – the word ‘bisexual’ to mean a society with two sexes. Is that the right word, even though it sounds wrong? Larger issue.. the Zanies, which are referred to in the same paragraph as ‘insane’, possibly ‘schizophrenic’, and then, bizarrely ‘psychopaths’.

K: Well, I think ‘bisexual’ does mean that, in the same way that ‘bipedal’ means moving about on two feet. But the more common usage has shifted lately to mean being sexually interested in two sexes.

K: Actually I stand corrected. Bisexual used to mean the same as hermaphrodite. So it’s not used correctly.

J: So McCoy was right that tribbles are bisexual?

K: Apparently so!

K: So I’m not sure if there is a single word that describes the fact that humans have two sexes. Binary sexes is the closest that springs to my mind.

K: The issues of insanity and madness was pretty strangely treated. Genly insists that the King of Karhide is ‘mad’, but I didn’t really see why he felt that way.

J: Yea, the king didn’t seem very mad. Oh, you know it bugged me we never got to see him pregnant. He was pregnant, but we never got to see it.

K: In fact, he went into complete seclusion while pregnant. Why? We’re not told if this is normal, if being pregnant is somehow considered unclean or embarrassing, or what. It didn’t make any sense at all except to make him look weak (because he was now a woman?). And then to top everything off, the baby died. Of what cause we don’t know.

J: You would’ve thought, if the kingship was passed down biologically, that there’d be a lot of pressure on him to get pregnant. So why did he wait so late? For one thing, couldn’t he have deliberately put himself around males in kemmer to make sure he was female?

K: It does seem like, even if Karhide wasn’t into the hormones the way the other countries may have been, there were ways to make himself end up female in kemmer. It definitely shouldn’t have been left to chance until he got biologically elderly.

J: Right!

K: So was there anything else that annoyed you?

J: Hrm. Annoyed or puzzled.. back to that chapter written by practically the only woman in the whole book. How is rape impossible?

K: I asked myself that same question. And I came to the same conclusion as you: Uh, what? Because there was no reason given, just this random assertion.

J: I’ll quote. Not that it’ll unconfuse us. “There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.”

K: That still doesn’t even make any sense. I don’t think the very fact of going into estrus is the same thing as invitation and consent; that opens up a whole other can of worms which is, are animals sentient enough -to- consent. I’m not philosophically or biologically or ethically equipped to answer that question. But I do wonder why they are trying to equate the Gethenians to ‘lesser’ mammals.

J: Right. Being.. ready for sex and interested in sex is not.. being willing to have it with a particular person! Plus.. I don’t see any reason someone in kemmer couldn’t rape someone not in kemmer. It does not require a vagina. Which we don’t even know if they have or don’t have when not in kemmer, because we don’t have quite enough detail about that.

K: Yeah. Do they have a smooth area? Are they Ken? But it doesn’t matter, since as you say, rape doesn’t require a vagina. Any kind of orifice will do, and of course sexual assault or molestation doesn’t even require that much.

J: “The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly.” Which says to /me/ that they have something on the outside, but Estraven says something to contradict that later.

J: You’d think forcing someone into kemmer would also be a form of sexual assault. Whether you did it chemically or by putting them in proximity with someone else in kemmer.

K: Yes, I agree. And these are sentient beings — humans — so just because they’re essentially in heat doesn’t mean they /have/ to have sex or want to have sex with /you/. I saw no evidence (and a lot of direct contradiction) that they were overwhelmed by lust with no control over themselves and willing to have sex with whoever was there.

J: Yea. Vulcans they’re not.

J: One last thing I had. Estraven dying seemed abrupt and pointless. I didn’t see it coming. (And since I’ve read this at least three times now, I should’ve!) Just.. dying for the sake of the main character learning something about himself. Or something. :P

K: It did seem kind of useless. Aside from Genly not having to go visit Estre at the end, I’m not completely sure what the use of the death was. Genly’s non-death was what brought about the change in governments; his ship was called before Estraven went on his suicide run; no one other than Genly seemed really to care.

K: Speaking of which, were we ever told why the Gethenians were so against suicide?

J: I don’t think so. Does that sort of thing need a reason?

K: Yes! The taboo against suicide in Catholicism is because you’ve committed a grave sin (murder) without being able to repent of it and confess and be cleansed. So you have no chance of going to heaven. Entirely logical if that’s your belief system. If you don’t have some reason, why would anyone care?

J: Well, I could theorize reasons. Harsh environment and low birth rate means everyone able to work and/or contribute to society is needed. But yea, I don’t think it’s explained.

K: Well, on the flip side, if you kill yourself, they no longer need to provide for you. So you’ve saved them energy and food and resources. So I’m not entirely sure that works — in any case, I just thought it was a weird little thing that got thrown in.

J: I think that about covers everything I wanted to say. I have a book of Joanna Russ reviews and essays and there’s at least two places in that where she talks about this book. So I’m interested in reading those and seeing her take on things.

K: I’m still not sure what I really think of this book. It definitely had a lot of different ideas in it, but on the other hand, I cannot say I enjoyed it or found the story coherent enough to pass my own personal threshold of ‘good’.

J: I liked it less this time than before. Well, maybe. I saw more flaws. But I also saw other things I’m sure I didn’t see before. All the political stuff that was going on and how the two nations were different.

K: Yeah. She did illustrate that pretty well, though in the end it wasn’t clear to me what the government of Karhide actually did for the people.

J: Threw parades for them.

K: Heh. So the next one up is Ringworld, which is another one I confuse with other books. Riverworld and Discworld both sound too similar!

J: It doesn’t just make you think of Ringworm?

K: That too.

Nebula Project: Rite of Passage

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Rite of Passage. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

In this 1968 winner, Mia Havero is a 12-year old girl living on ship carved into an asteroid, part of the remnants of the human race who escaped Earth prior to its destruction. In just two years, she faces the Trial, which all children living on the ship must go through. And many don’t live through. We follow her adventures growing up on the ship, losing and making friends, and training to help her survive the Trial. When she and a group of other 14 year olds are dropped off on a colonized planet, they face not only the elements, treacherous terrain, and wild animals, but the unknown colonists as well.

J: So, I was quite surprised to see this book on the list of Nebula award-winning novels! I’d read it in college and kind of thought it was one of those obscure little gems you find that hardly anyone else has heard of.

K: Well, obscure is right, at least from my perspective. But that doesn’t always mean very much when you’re not as familiar with parts of the genre. So I had never read this or even heard of it.

J: I couldn’t even tell you how I found it in the first place. It might’ve been one of those books referenced in old(ish) critical essays I was reading at the time. Or possibly by subject headings. From the, now-primitive, college library computer catalog. I had fun with that!

K: If I had heard of it I probably would have picked it up, solely for the novelty of a teenage girl protaganist.

J: Yea. To be honest, though I remembered I really, really liked it. I didn’t remember much. Just, obviously there was a rite of passage, and it took place in a generation ship. I was really surprised at the YA-ness of it on re-reading.

K: Yes, if this was published now it would instantly be plopped in the YA area, maybe with a head-chopped off girl on the cover, which would pretty much guarantee that at the very least hardly any adult males would read it.

J: And it would be a really hard sell to win the Nebula because of it.

K: Ghettoized as YA for girls.

J: Though I bet it would’ve sold really well, especially in the wake of The Hunger Games. Although then perhaps been compared unfavorably with it.

K: I haven’t read the Hunger Games books, but I know enough about them that they did spring to mind as a comparison point. And I can see why it might not compare favorably with a more recent book. It was very… mmm. It wasn’t _dated_ exactly, but it didn’t have the same feel as modern fiction.

J: Not to get off on a tangent — but you haven’t read The Hunger Games?! But I’ll tell you something I noticed that may have been why it felt dated? She explained. Everything. The details of going out on the surface of the ship. The details of constructing a log cabin. The details of soccer. Everything. Indiscriminately.

K: That’s true. There was no expectation that the audience would be familiar enough with these things to just imagine them without all this additional explanation. Though I have to say, the log cabin scene — he didn’t /quite/ plagiarize Laura Ingalls Wilder, but it was a damn close call.

J: I just started reading the Little House books for our other Triple Take reading, so I can definitely see that. On the one hand, it was neat she was treating ‘mundane’ things with equal weight as ‘oooh spacey things’, as you would do if you were living it. They’re all normal to you. But on the other hand, it can get dull and a bit.. ‘why are you telling me this?’ The details of soccer and of log cabin building, to /such/ a degree, were just not necessary.

K: Yeah, it was an odd choice. I can’t say I -minded- especially, but I also didn’t read those sections with as much attention as I probably could have.

J: You know I don’t mind those sorts of details when it’s.. for a purpose. Like if they were actually going to /use/ that cabin. I don’t think you’ve read him, but Steven Gould’s books are really big on planning and doing these sorts of things with lengthy descriptions. Sort of like reading Robinson Crusoe, from what I remember of Robinson Crusoe. If there’s an ulterior plan. ‘I am doing this to survive and improve my life’ sort of thing.

J: Oh, or Clan of the Cave Bear, which we talked about RL earlier.

J: Or even Little House for that matter!

K: Yeah. Exactly. The purpose of the details wasn’t at all clear to me. It didn’t illuminate the society any to tell us the rules of soccer, though it did tell me something that it was called soccer.

J: Oh, odd. I kind of thought he was Russian. Wikipedia says American and that his real name is actually Alexis. Which would’ve been interesting, because I see that as a female name. And his wife’s name is Cory, which I read the opposite way. So maybe he just didn’t think twice about calling it soccer. They do all seem to be speaking English. Though at least he showed a language shift on one colony.

K: Yeah, it is entirely possible that that wasn’t actually a considered choice in any way. Which would be disappointing.

J: Yes. Because he did seem to be trying to be global, at least in some ways. Though the main character.. what’s her name? I am so bad at character names unless they’re particularly memorable… is said to have Spanish and some other ancestry I don’t now remember. Italian? Indian? And her tutor has enough African ancestry to have a South African name.

J: Havero! Have Arrow. Mia was it?

J: See, he gave me a mnemonic and eventually I remembered. Which is actually an interesting parallel with The Hunger Games, which you unaccountably have not read.

K: The names were relatively diverse, yes. More diverse than I would have predicted, given the time period it was written. But like so many authors, even though he gave some thought to a) diversity of names, and b) a rough gender balance among the children, he fell down completely on part c) gender balance among the adult population.

J: Hrrrm. Yes, we see mostly men. And I did notice her survival trainer guy was male. And I was a little puzzled by the gender split when they were building the cabin.

J: They were about 13 when they did the cabin, right? So the boys wouldn’t have been taller than the girls, on average. It would’ve made more sense to me to assign tasks based on individuals. The stronger, the more physically fit, or just whoever showed aptitude after cutting down their first tree.

K: I was having trouble figuring out if the society was supposed to be egalitarian or not. On the argument for, they haven’t turned the women into baby making machines and they seem to have as much autonomy as men to go and do stuff. No one tells Mia she’s out of line for wanting to train for her desired job. Girls and boys appear to endure the exact same trial with no accomodations made for gender.

K: On the argument against, they distributed the cabin work by gender. And we see zero women in positions of authority. Toward the end, they even refer to the ‘men’ on the council. The only adult women we see are flaky (Mia’s mom, that woman who got pregnant) or rigid and annoying (That woman down in the engineering section.)

J: True. Rather like Harry Potter. Only moreso, since we don’t even see female teachers and nurses. Do you think he was concentrating so much on making the kids equal that he just wasn’t thinking whenever he needed to pull in an adult? He defaulted to male and didn’t undefault himself?

K: Probably. You know how annoyed I get though when people start defaulting to male all over the place. It only looks worse when they’ve gone to the trouble to make a female main character. It’s like they’re so busy congratulating themselves for being forward thinking and different that it completely falls apart everywhere else.

J: (I just had a moment of grave disappointment. I thought I had found and bought the sequel to this. But.. there is no sequel? What I have is a collection of short stories. A further disappointment is I thought this supposed sequel might’ve been cowritten with his wife and fixed some of the gender imbalance. Sigh. I’ll just have to imagine my own sequel, I guess.)

K: The collection of short stories contains several stories set in the same universe. And Mia and Jimmy show up very briefly in one. It’s not entirely a sequel.

J: Okay. That lessens the disappointment somewhat. :)

K: Did you read the intro by the way?

J: I did not read the intro.

K: He goes on a bit in there about how he decided deliberately to make the main character a girl. To be different.

J: Well, I can see that! Is that why he won the Nebula? A girl character was so shocking, new, and brilliant? The first since Podkayne of Mars?

K: Ha! You should definitely read the intro before you return the book. As it turns out, after he sold the original story, it was delayed for publication because of Podkayne running in the same magazine. And then he was afraid people would think he’d copied.

J: *snerk!* I thought Podkayne was older. Okay. I will read it.

J: So it was a short story first? Maybe the soccer and log cabin stuff was padding then. :P

K: Yeah. I’m not entirely sure what was the story and where the join came in but I suspect it may have been just the epilogue and a bit of the trial that was the original story.

K: He mentioned about needing to add additional information about ‘why they reacted as they did’ which I assume he means being the vote at the end.

J: Ah. I found it rather odd that they’d assume the next generation would react any differently.

K: Well, it has been typical of our society anyway to become more inclusive and accepting over time. I just was reading an article about it earlier, noting that all those anti gay marriage laws that were passed a few years ago were propelled in for the most part by people aged 50+. Which makes it much more difficult for the younger generation, who more generally favors legalizing same sex marriage, to actually implement it.

K: http://www.slate.com/id/2297897/

J: Yes, but he made a big point of saying how stagnant they are. How their art and their novels are mostly nonexistent and suck when they do exist.

K: Yeah. There were a lot of points being made, some of them contradictory in nature. That the people on the ships, the so called guardians of human knowledge, were so busy trying to preserve themselves and everything that they’d lost their essential humanness which is to change and grow. And a symptom was the complete loss of real creativity. But the colonists didn’t really seem to be doing much better, so it wasn’t like we were supposed to feel for them!

K: What bothered me the most was, I was totally unclear at the end – were just the colonists subjected to the punishment or was it the whole planet? Because they never did bother to find out if those aliens were sentient or not.

J: Yet Jimmy showed creativity when he wrote his ethics paper. So I don’t see what’s so special about art that all other forms of creativity aren’t also suffering. Are they improving their technology or aren’t they? I wasn’t too clear on that.

J: Good question. I don’t think they cared too much about the aliens, just as a ‘slavery is bad’ meme while at the same time not considering them human enough to count for anything.

K: I was pretty puzzled at the whole cultural stagnation thing myself. I can understand the point which was trying to be made, I just find it unlikely that the human imagination could be so very easily stifled as all that.

K: But part of what I think he was trying to say was, if you don’t feel any urgency, you don’t get things done. The people on the Ships lived for a really long time, so long that they didn’t really feel any urgency to accomplish much of anything.

J: You’d think they could’ve realized that and built-in counters to it. Like a rite of passage for 50 year olds. Create something awesome or die!!

K: Oh, but the adults would never have approved of that. It’s only the people who aren’t allowed to vote who can get so easily screwed over.

J: Heh.

K: I wasn’t sure if the whole clothing business was due to a lack of imagination (or maybe a male lapse) on the part of the author, or if it was deliberate, another sign of the Ships deteriorating creativity.

J: What clothing business?

K: When Mia is down on the planet for her trial, she sees some girls wearing dresses and apparently has never seen such things before, because she identifies them as something out of her experience. Which I find very odd, because even if the Ship has a small population, the names indicate it’s a /diverse/ population, or was to begin with. And fashion between cultures is very diverse. I find it hard to believe that no one on the ships ever wears a dress or dress-like item (sari? toga? sarong? kilt?).

K: This is a problem you see often in books, where one culture or group of people is given shorthand by having them always wear the exact same clothing every time they’re encountered. But it just reminds me of a cartoon, like Scooby-Doo, where they’re always drawn the same. It’s not realistic!

J: Ah. Okay. I guess I hadn’t considered it that deeply. I took it as ‘we don’t need to wear clothes because we’re in the perfect environment, but we do because it’s custom, sometimes, or something’. And so they wear what you might typically see an astronaut wearing. Shorts and a tshirt. Which probably makes more sense in zero gravity than other clothes. BUt of course they’re not in zero gravity. And they have wild parts of the ship where more clothes would be nice!

K: Right. That’s what we would wear all the time probably. Because frankly, I don’t enjoy picking out clothes. But I know that a lot of people do enjoy it and find it an expression of their personality. And we even see Mia going ‘shopping’ with her friend Helen, so they do give thought to looking nice and fashionable in their clothing. Which makes me think there must be trends and styles — I’m inclined here to blame Panshin for just not thinking it through all the way.

J: No art means no Teefury and Woot shirts!

K: Tim Gunn weeps.

J: The one thing I did remember about this book that I didn’t remember was _from_ this book (and I suspect a similar idea may appear in Asimov’s work somewhere as well) is Mia’s chosen profession of synthesist. It sounded so perfect. I wanted to be one when I grew up.

K: It was a very interesting profession. And so was ordinologist, which is described around the same time. But what baffled and annoyed me was the bizarre slam against librarians which came out at the same time. Because an ordinologist’s job /is/ library and information science, no two ways about it. Except Mia (and Panshin?) makes a point of saying it’s way beyond the librarian.

J: I can’t find a bio of him that lists any profession other than writer. I thought it’d be interesting if he was a librarian or anything that might shed light on that view of things. But probably he just had the typical picture of librarians. They can find things. But no thought given to /why/ they can find things, because they put them in a findable spot in the first place.

K: I don’t know. I find it hard to believe he could describe the profession so accurately without knowing what he was doing. I’m just not sure why he felt the need to give it another name altogether.

J: Libraries are girly. Ordinology is hard manly science.

J: I have one burning, burning question that I must ask you!

K: Shoot!

J: Why was the tiger purple?

K: It was purple? Good lord, I didn’t even notice.

J: It was totally purple!! Go ahead and look. I’ll wait. :)

K: Yep, it was purple. Reading the description, I get the impression they’re calling it ‘tiger’ but it’s just a word they may be using for any dangerous animal. It doesn’t even seem particularly cat-like.

J: It made me mistrust it was a ‘tiger’ as I knew it. It had a wedge-shaped head or face and that didn’t sound right for a tiger either, but other than that, it didn’t have much description.

K: Yeah. I have no idea what it’s actually meant to be, if anything.

J: And yet, in contrast, the planets seem exactly like Earth. These colonies have not been there long enough to be growing Earth trees all over the freaking place. There is not a thing described as /un/Earthlike, except for the aliens and the gravity.

K: True again. I wonder if this is something that we sort of ran into in some of the other books — the climate and composition of those planets wasn’t actually important to the point Panshin was trying to make, so he just took the easy way out and didn’t devote much time to thinking about them.

J: Ah to be a writer in the 60s, when you didn’t have to think about everything, just your central point. :)

K: Convenient that! But we’re almost out of the 60s now.

J: I was just noticing that myself! 70s, here we come!

Doubletake: Cold Magic (Kate Elliott)

The Plot
Catherine Hassi Barahal has been raised by her aunt and uncle after the accidental death of her parents when she was just a little girl. Now nearly twenty — considered the age of majority both legally and by society — she finds her ordered world turned on its head when a cold mage from one of the powerful mage houses arrives one night and claims the Barahal family is under obligation to let him marry their eldest daughter. Cat, older than her cousin Beatrice by just a couple months, finds herself abruptly wed to this arrogant stranger and carted off to Four Moons House and an unknown fate.

My Thoughts
First, some background: in the summer of 1996, I was doing an internship at Middlebury College. I didn’t know anyone, and I was feeling particularly antisocial that summer; it was not the best for networking during an internship, but conditions were perfect for consuming vast quantities of books. I spent quite a bit of time at the small bookshop in town, and every time I visited, my eyes were caught by a group of fat novels by Kate Elliott — the Jaran series. I’d pick them up, look at the covers, read the back copy, and then put them back without buying them, though somehow in the back of my mind I always felt that their eventual purchase was inevitable. And soon enough the day came that I could find no other more pressing books to buy, so purchase them I did.

I read them, and I enjoyed them quite a lot (though the later books not quite as much, as focus shifted to characters I cared for less), enough that Elliott was on my watch list as an author whose other books I would probably enjoy.

But for various reasons, though I’ve picked up others of her series, I’ve never actually read them through. Crown of Stars lost me with book 2’s horrific cover. And the giant Eagles of Spirit Gate — for some reason they just didn’t capture my imagination. So by the time the Spiritwalker trilogy’s first installment was released, I wasn’t sure how I would react. However, it passed the cover test, and I very much wanted to like it.

The story begins in the city of Adurnam on the southern coast of Britain. Geography is considerably different in this alternate Earth, but my best guess is that Adurnam is roughly near where Southampton is today. And that will be my last attempt to identify this world with our own, because though I am compelled to try and work out the differences, the differences here are not only vast, they involve a great deal of history with which I’m only marginally familiar. (I point again to the Strange Horizons review which goes further into the alternativeness of the timeline.) Some years ago, much of Europe was in flames as the result of a Napoleanic general, known as Camjiata. He was defeated and imprisoned and society has returned to a more even keel since, though there are hints of discontent stirring (once again?) among the lower classes. Adurnam in this world is a city which boasts a university and a growing industrial base, and is thus a place where the classes are often thrust into contact with one another. The Hassi Barahals, a branch of a larger clan, have a house here in a respectable neighborhood.

From here, the story takes quite a number of twists and turns which I, happily spoiler free, did not always anticipate or see coming. The first segment of the story involves Cat and her cousin Beatrice at the university, giving us an introduction to the way upper middle class society operates. But just when you start to think the plot might center around the school and a mystery surrounding people there, the story shifts: Andevai Diarisso Haranwy appears at the Barahal house, marries Catherine and then spirits her off in a carriage. We then follow them on their travels as they make their way back across the countryside to Four Moons House, where Andevai will report on the success of his mission(s). But just when you start to think the story might center around the journey (both literal and figurative) of two people whose pride prevents them from admitting they find each other attractive, the story shifts: we discover that Andevai has mucked up his assignment thanks to the cleverness of the elder Barahals and Cat’s world is overturned yet again.

There are several more shifts of this nature as the book progresses, and though I was able to predict a few things before they happened (a certain inevitable betrayal springs to mind) the plot remained for the most part delightfully unexpected. By the time we reach our climax and slope down to the point where this story ends, the reader can be both satisfied by the number of revelations made and tantalized by the questions left unanswered. Fortunately for everyone, the second book of the trilogy, Cold Fire, is due to be released in the fall, and Elliott has begun doing the spadework for the third, so at least in publishing time (if not so much in real time) there won’t be much of a wait.

In Short
After enjoying the Jaran books very much, I had been unable to recapture the same level of pleasure with Elliott’s subsequent series — until Cold Magic. This book, the first of a trilogy (… and dare we hope for additional visits to this world afterward? We are already promised a Rory-centric short story.) introduces an alternate Earth where history and climate has gone not quite as it did in our own. Catherine, the point of view character, is learning about the world much as we do while her previously sheltered life is exploded. She is likeable and, more importantly, intriguing, along with her entire supporting cast. I had borrowed this book from the library to read, which I thought a suitable caution after my inability to get into Crown of Stars or Crossroads, but I’ve already ordered a copy for myself and pre-ordered the second, which should say it all.

Doubletake: J on I Am J

You might guess why I Am J by Cris Beam caught my eye. I am J! How much more awesome was it when I learned it was about a transgender teen? Though I have to tell him, J is not a good artist name. Bad Googlefu. I even wimped out on my name badge at work and wrote it Jae. People can handle two initials. AJ, PJ, etc. But one letter just doesn’t work so well.

Case in point, while reading it was easy to mistake J for I. Just like 3-letter names that look a little too much like You aren’t good either.

This book starts off using the male pronoun for J, even though at the beginning, he hasn’t yet articulated to himself that he’s transgender. He just knows that, even though he has a crush on his female best friend, he’s not a lesbian. I sort of liked that. Sometimes books like this just start out with the teen knowing who they are and only having to go through the process of convincing everyone else. In this one, he was still wrestling the idea of his own identity.

All is not sweetness and light in the land of J either. Full of angst! He runs away, then comes back. Then runs away with more planning, and gets hooked up with a teen shelter and an LGBT high school. Then gets dragged back home. He tells his mother, who then basically (but nicely, if manipulatively and sneakily) kicks him out.

In contrast to Parrotfish and Luna, this gets quite heavily into the nitty gritty. For instance, just as I was wondering what happens if you start taking testosterone and then stop, the book tells me. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a how-to manual, but it does answer many questions you might have about the whole thing.

I did find a couple of things difficult to believe. He reads up on testosterone on the Internet, and then something like a day later, he’s thinking of it as T. Isn’t that something you’d pick up after being part of a community? And why didn’t he reach out on forums and things to other transmen? He just decides one day to go to the clinic and try to get some ‘T’. Like.. didn’t anything he read online tell him you can’t just do that? I think even Oprah (aww, she just had her last show) knows you need a brain doctor to approve that sort of thing.

And then to just be able to waltz into an LGBT high school! Jeez, must be nice to live in a big city where they have high schools for everything! That’s almost like living in a fairy tale. It’s hard for me to believe those even exist. When my choice of high school was the public school or the Catholic school in the next town. Is there even an LGBT college? Hrrm.

Speaking of colleges, his mother is all ‘Apply to college. Here’s some applications I got for you.’ And then he carries those things around for awhile, and I’m like.. what? What year is this? Paper! Paper applications?! Snail mail?! I mean, I suppose some of them might still exist, but not the big schools.. not most schools?

All in all, I’m glad this book exists. There definitely needs to be more like it. When the only two I can think of are also the only two listed in the additional reading at the back of the book, well… Still, I did enjoy Parrotfish much more. So if you only want to read one, read that one.

I Am J is another voice in a very small crowd, and I’m glad it exists. Plus, still gotta love that title.