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Books From My Vacation
Jul. 5th, 2023 03:20 pmNetwork Effect (Murderbot Diaries #5) by Martha Wells - Most of the Murderbot books are novella-length and stand alone fairly well. This is novel length, features a plot with more twists and lots of recurring characters (including ART, in case you missed him), and delves more deeply into the world-building of the universe, particularly the politics of colonization and the issues of "alien remnants". And it creates a lot of hooks for future stories and ongoing relationships between the characters. Honestly, I think the series works better when it's shorter sci-fi mystery stories with Murderbot as the Miss Marple in the middle of things. Which is good, because...
Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot Diaries #6) by Martha Wells is totally a return to form. A cozy murder-mystery on Preservation Station and Murderbot is the consulting detective, weaving the sci-fi elements around Murderbot's disinterest in socializing and grudging desire to solve the mystery and save the stupid humans.
Role Playing by Cathy Yardley - So, I bought this (via Kindle First Reads) as a fluffy beach read, and that's what it is to most readers: Middle-aged divorced woman dealing with empty-nesting and middle-aged never-married man dealing with his aging mother meet on an MMO server, but due to hilarious misunderstanding she thinks he's 18 and he thinks she's 80. Decent meet-cute, the chapter titles are TV Tropes, the author... has probably talked to people who've played MMOs. The thing is, the dude's mother is a manipulative, demanding jerk who clearly favors his younger brother; and the dude is bi, a fact that no-one in his family has taken well. So this ended up hitting me a lot harder than I suspect it would the average reader (or than the author likely intended). Anyway, if you aren't a middle-aged bi dude who has issues with his mother, it's a lovely fluffy romance beach read.
Schoolbooks and Sorcery, ed. Michael M. Jones – I backed the Kickstarter for this anthology of “queer kids at magic school” short stories, a combination of just generally wanting it to exist and because I had hope for the stories from a couple authors I recognized. Seanan McGuire opens with a decent story that I suspect she could have gotten a Wayward Children-style novella out of…and honestly that would have been a better use of the next hundred pages. This suffers from the too-narrow anthology problem, where the details change and there are occasional clever lines, but every story is basically the same. In this case, it’s teenagers who go “people don’t accept me because I’m queer and/or magical”, but by the end of five pages someone has accepted that they are queer and/or magical, with the same emotional beats every time. Some are more power fantasy and some are more acceptance fantasy, but very few of them actually stand apart besides the window dressing. “Where We Came From” stood out in that it had multiple interesting plot threads weaving through it, but it really needed three times the length to actually pay most of them off. “Grimoire Girls” (with the usual caveat that I know E.C. Myers personally) could have used a slightly tighter editing pass, but was also one of the strong takes on the formula. Overall, I’m glad it exists but it’s kinda monotonous to read through all at once.
Please Scream Quietly by Julie Fennell – A formal academic exploration of the BDSM “pansexual scene.” I specifically seeked out this book because I met the author at a con last year, and it didn’t disappoint in that it took a very dry tone but both openly admitted the author’s personal involvement and biases; and called out the scene on a bunch of its inherent misconceptions and contradictions. Drawing from both interviews and surveys, her findings matched up with a lot of what I (and most other people I’ve spoken to) already suspected was the case regarding gender biases (men top, women bottom, GNC people get pushed heteronormatively; and reputation—good or bad—matters much more strongly for people with penises), sexuality (heavily queer but with distinct separation from both the gay men/lesbian women and straight “swinger” subcommunities), stated precepts versus practice (people discuss safety heavily but often reward “advanced” practitioners who eschew it), race (extremely white), and overlap with other subcultures (geeks, pagans, Renn Faire types). Also interesting was that this mostly took a snapshot of the scene in the particular 2011-2017 time period, after Fetlife radically changed the nature of organizing but before covid forced everything to reset. (She also mentions the #MeToo movement impacting the scene in the late teens, but at least anecdotally, I haven’t seen a significant cultural impact from that.) I suspect it won’t happen, but I’d love to see her summarize a bunch of the chapters on the spoken and unspoken rules and norms into a booklet that could get given to newbies.
Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot Diaries #6) by Martha Wells is totally a return to form. A cozy murder-mystery on Preservation Station and Murderbot is the consulting detective, weaving the sci-fi elements around Murderbot's disinterest in socializing and grudging desire to solve the mystery and save the stupid humans.
Role Playing by Cathy Yardley - So, I bought this (via Kindle First Reads) as a fluffy beach read, and that's what it is to most readers: Middle-aged divorced woman dealing with empty-nesting and middle-aged never-married man dealing with his aging mother meet on an MMO server, but due to hilarious misunderstanding she thinks he's 18 and he thinks she's 80. Decent meet-cute, the chapter titles are TV Tropes, the author... has probably talked to people who've played MMOs. The thing is, the dude's mother is a manipulative, demanding jerk who clearly favors his younger brother; and the dude is bi, a fact that no-one in his family has taken well. So this ended up hitting me a lot harder than I suspect it would the average reader (or than the author likely intended). Anyway, if you aren't a middle-aged bi dude who has issues with his mother, it's a lovely fluffy romance beach read.
Schoolbooks and Sorcery, ed. Michael M. Jones – I backed the Kickstarter for this anthology of “queer kids at magic school” short stories, a combination of just generally wanting it to exist and because I had hope for the stories from a couple authors I recognized. Seanan McGuire opens with a decent story that I suspect she could have gotten a Wayward Children-style novella out of…and honestly that would have been a better use of the next hundred pages. This suffers from the too-narrow anthology problem, where the details change and there are occasional clever lines, but every story is basically the same. In this case, it’s teenagers who go “people don’t accept me because I’m queer and/or magical”, but by the end of five pages someone has accepted that they are queer and/or magical, with the same emotional beats every time. Some are more power fantasy and some are more acceptance fantasy, but very few of them actually stand apart besides the window dressing. “Where We Came From” stood out in that it had multiple interesting plot threads weaving through it, but it really needed three times the length to actually pay most of them off. “Grimoire Girls” (with the usual caveat that I know E.C. Myers personally) could have used a slightly tighter editing pass, but was also one of the strong takes on the formula. Overall, I’m glad it exists but it’s kinda monotonous to read through all at once.
Please Scream Quietly by Julie Fennell – A formal academic exploration of the BDSM “pansexual scene.” I specifically seeked out this book because I met the author at a con last year, and it didn’t disappoint in that it took a very dry tone but both openly admitted the author’s personal involvement and biases; and called out the scene on a bunch of its inherent misconceptions and contradictions. Drawing from both interviews and surveys, her findings matched up with a lot of what I (and most other people I’ve spoken to) already suspected was the case regarding gender biases (men top, women bottom, GNC people get pushed heteronormatively; and reputation—good or bad—matters much more strongly for people with penises), sexuality (heavily queer but with distinct separation from both the gay men/lesbian women and straight “swinger” subcommunities), stated precepts versus practice (people discuss safety heavily but often reward “advanced” practitioners who eschew it), race (extremely white), and overlap with other subcultures (geeks, pagans, Renn Faire types). Also interesting was that this mostly took a snapshot of the scene in the particular 2011-2017 time period, after Fetlife radically changed the nature of organizing but before covid forced everything to reset. (She also mentions the #MeToo movement impacting the scene in the late teens, but at least anecdotally, I haven’t seen a significant cultural impact from that.) I suspect it won’t happen, but I’d love to see her summarize a bunch of the chapters on the spoken and unspoken rules and norms into a booklet that could get given to newbies.
