Books read, late October

Patty Bryant, Joel Derfner, Tessa Gratton, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Ellen Kushner, Malinda Lo, Racheline Maltese, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Paul Whitcover. Tremontaine, a serial: all of season 1 and season 2 through episode 8. Season 1 is discussed elsewhere and I will review seasons 2 and 3 entire rather than piecemeal here.

A.S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories. Reread. I have been collecting the works of Byatt used when I am trading in books I don't want, and I don't always have a clear memory of which stories are in which volumes. Therefore I could be blindsided by the last work in this volume, in which an older woman is considering a sexual harassment complaint lodged by a younger woman against an older man. And...oh Antonia. Oh my dear Antonia no. She replicates...oh, it's awful. She replicates all the ways that young women get dismissed when they've been assaulted, and she does dismiss her, she's mentally ill, she doesn't really get art, her clothes are unattractive, the man she's accusing must have been very attractive in his younger days, oh God, it's nauseating, it's everything we hear every day and I kept looking for some shred of evidence that it was meant to be scathing irony, that she had done it on purpose. But no, the protagonist and the accused kept having their damned lunch. Antonia. Dammit. I should mark it with a PostIt, because I don't want to pretend it doesn't exist, I don't need to pretend she's perfect just because I love her, but I will forget what's in which volume, I always do. There, I've done that. But hell, what a week, what a year, what a lifetime to stumble on that story again.

Charles de Lint, Moonlight and Vines. Reread. This is a Newford collection that is not where my heart is any more, but also is fairly readable, a parade of characters each doing their thing, only occasionally visiting Jilly and Geordie, not yet full-on formula ensemble cast. I hadn't read it since 1999. I think I loved it in 1999, and yet...I never reread it. It was not my formative Newford collection. I'm glad contemporary fantasy has moved on from here, and I winced at some of de Lint's attempts to be inclusive, but I also am glad that he made the attempts, glad that we kept going from there.

Nicky Drayden, The Prey of Gods. This was a very fast-paced, exciting read. I've seen lots of people describing it as fun, and I did have fun with it, but I want to flag that while there is a lot of cool futuristic and magical South African content in this book that is like nothing else I have ever read before so lots of you are already buying it or adding it to your library list...it also has some fairly upsetting sexually violent content. And I am trying to be cautious about flagging that. It is...I don't know, science fantasy always feels like it means something specific and not-this. It is futuristic fantasy. It is a weird ride. You shouldn't get too hung up on genre boundaries when describing this book. But...maybe not if you're feeling fragile about sexual violence, please. Time it carefully, take care of yourselves.

Todd Fahnestock, The Wishing World. Discussed elsewhere.

William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. This was a gigantic tome with lots of consultations with modern Iroquoian peoples even though its focus was pre-Columbian and the first few centuries after contact. It went into a great deal of ritual detail. It also discussed lots of fascinating aspects of how different family structures shaped relationships and communications with other ethnic groups. I'm very glad I read this book, but even more glad that I am done reading it because oh my goodness it is very very large.

Thor Hanson, The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History. I found this very soothing, a discussion of all sorts of different ways plants have evolved shapes and sizes and types of seeds. Yay seeds. When the world is complicated and upsetting, botany is VERY NICE. This may explain much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. MY SYMPATHIES, THOSE CENTURIES.

Carrie Jones, Enhanced. Discussed elsewhere.

John Julius Norwich, ed., Cities That Shaped the Ancient World. I was expecting Norwich's own work--library thumbnails are sometimes misleading--and this was essays by divers hands, with lots of lavish pictures: ancient cities, photos, layouts, ideas about what was cool about them. It was, as I expected of Norwich, heavily focused on the Mediterranean region, but there were sections on southern Africa, east Asia, the Americas. It was not deep. It was a reasonably fun thing to get from the library and look at the pictures.

Tremontaine Season 2, Season 3 episodes 1-4

Review access provided by Serial Box. Written by Joel Derfner, Tessa Gratton, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Ellen Kushner, Karen Lord, Racheline Maltese, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Paul Witcover.

A sharp eye will notice that this is a substantially overlapping but not identical writing staff to Tremontaine Season 1. An even sharper eye will start to discern the difference in episode writers in very much the same way as a long-term viewer of a TV show can--especially if they've read some of the above authors before. Alaya Dawn Johnson remains my favorite, but if you've read Mary Anne Mohanraj before, a blind taste test will show you which episodes are hers, no problem. And--this is not a criticism. This is a serial. It's not supposed to be a seamlessly edited novel where there is no extraneous reminder of what has gone before. It's supposed to be a serial. Divers hands recruited specifically.

A friend of mine commented on my review of season 1, that a lot of it felt like retcons to her. And I've been thinking about why it didn't feel that way to me, because season 2 and the beginning of season 3 go even deeper into making this a world that has borders beyond Riverside, beyond the City, beyond its country. I think the reason this is working particularly well for me as an expansion is that the original protagonists of Swordspoint are focused to the point of being self-centered, and while some of the protagonists of this serial are also focused/self-centered (heh, oh my yes), their focus is not all in the same place. So: would the originals have known where chocolate came from in any detail? Not if it bit them rather than them biting it. Is Ixkaab similarly self-centered, but with a different focus? Definitely. And therefore her knowledge of the world is quite different, while retaining many of the features of the original.

There is so much scheming here. So much scheming. I think that while season one had scheming, the thing that makes seasons two and three work better for me is that they have follow-through. They have consequences to the scheming. Does anyone learn their lesson? They learn many lessons, but their lesson, ahaha no. So--many relationships are reconfigured, this is not a series that has set pieces that are repeating over and over again, but things ramify. I do love ramifications.

And the mathematician gets to do math that is not just navigation calculations, which I like, because navigation is mostly interesting to non-mathematicians. Some people will be in this for the sex, of which there is a considerable and varied amount. Okay. For me, the mathematician gets to do more geometric stuff, hurrah. One of the benefits of a varied ensemble cast that keeps getting more varied is that it increases the odds that you will find a favorite somewhere: the duchess, the forger, the ambassador, the merchant? The mathematician. Who also knows a lot about cows and turnips and does not like yelling.

We have gotten to a place, by the end of the fourth episode of season three, where plot has reached social proportions. Where it is not just one person's schemes or another but the movement of people, sieges and...well, one might call it barricades. One just might. I was interested in what happened to the mathematician, but I am captivated by what happens with the aftermath of the social unrest. And there are new installments coming along weekly. Yay.