club93 | Member Posts

just_unrequited just opened! (as in, writers are public, I can unanon)

Title : Wanted and wanting
Author : Nelja
Fandom : Gravity Falls
Characters/Ships : Bill/Ford
Genre : Humor, angst
Summary : Bill is proud of himself. It's the flirtiest WANTED poster ever, and Ford is bound to notice, isn't he?
Rating : PG
Disclaimer : It was created by Alex Hirsch!
Word Count : ~1700

( Link to AO3 )

Here is my fic, about Yana and the Tenth Doctor, by Melime
Brilliant

And another fic was written on the same ship, even if it was not for me I want to talk about my small ship again
Silver Lies Hidden in the Core of Dreams by Zabbers (AO3 locked)

flo_nelja

22 juin : « Ça ne veut rien dire »
Twelfth Night, Orsino/Viola, PG
Un conte qui ne signifie rien sur AO3

23 juin : Les opposés s’attirent
Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Homura/Madoka, PG
Distance sur AO3

24 juin : Polycule en V
Gundam Wing, Lady Une/Treize/Zechs, PG
Avec civilité et ressentiment sur AO3

skygiants

I was traveling again for much of last week which meant, again, it was time to work through an emergency paperback to see if it was discardable. And, indeed, it was! And you would think that reading and discarding one bad book on my travels, dayenu, would have been enough -- but then my friend brought me to books4free, where I could not resist the temptation to pick up another emergency gothic. And, lo and behold, this book turned out to be even worse, and was discarded before the trip was out!

The two books were not even much alike, but I'm going to write them up together anyway because a.) I read them in such proximity and b.) though I did not like either of them, neither quite reached the over-the-top delights of joyous badness that would demand a solo post.

The first -- and this one I'd been hanging onto for some years after finding it in a used bookstore in San Francisco -- was Esbae: A Winter's Tale (published 1981), a college-campus urban fantasy in which (as the Wikipedia summary succinctly says) a college student named Chuck summons Asmodeus to help him pass his exams. However, Chuck is an Asshole Popular Boy who Hates Books and is Afraid of the Library, so he enlists a Clumsy, Intellectual, Unconventional Classmate with Unfashionable Long Red Locks named Sophie to help him with his project. Sophie is, of course, the heroine of the book, and Moreover!! she is chosen by the titular Esbae, a shapechanging magical creature who's been kicked out into the human realm to act as a magical servant until and unless he helps with the performance of a Great and Heroic Deed, to be his potentially heroic master.

Unfortunately after this happens Sophie doesn't actually do very much. The rest of the plot involves Chuck incompetently stalking Sophie to attempt to sacrifice her to Asmodeus, which Sophie barely notices because she's busy cheerfully entering into an affair with the history professor who taught them about Asmodeus to begin with.

In fact only thing of note that nerdy, clumsy Sophie really accomplishes during this section is to fly into a rage with Esbae when she finds out that Esbae has been secretly following her to protect her from Chuck and beat her unprotesting magical creature of pure goodness up?? to which is layered on the extra unfortunate layer that Esbae often takes the form of a small brown-skinned child that Sophie saw playing the Heroine's Clever Moorish Servant in an opera one time??? Sophie, who is justifiably horrified with herself about this, talks it over with her history professor and they decide that with great mastery comes great responsibility and that Sophie has to be a Good Master. Obviously this does not mean not having a magical servant who is completely within your power and obeys your every command, but probably does mean not taking advantage of the situation to beat the servant up even if you're really mad. And we all move on! Much to unpack there, none of which ever will be.

Anyway. Occult shenanigans happen at a big campus party, Esbae Accomplishes A Heroic Deed, Sophie and her history professor live happily ever after. It's 1981. This book was nominated for a Locus Award, which certainly does put things in perspective.

The second book, the free bookstore pickup, was Ronald Scott Thorn's The Twin Serpents (1965) which begins with a brilliant plastic surgeon! tragically dead! with a tragically dead wife!! FOLLOWED BY: the discovery of a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who claims to know nothing about the brilliant plastic surgeon ....

stop! rewind! You might be wondering how we got here! Well, the brilliant plastic surgeon (mid-forties) had a Cold and Shallow but Terribly Beautiful twenty-three-year-old aristocratic wife, and she had a twin brother who was not only a corrupt and debauched and spendthrift aristocrat AND not only psychologically twisted as a result of his physical disability (leg problems) BUT of course mildly incestuous with his twin sister as well and PROBABLY the cause of her inexplicable, unnatural distaste for the idea of having children. I trust this gives you a sense of the vibe.

However, honestly the biggest disappointment is that for a book that contains incestuous twins, face-changing surgery [self-performed!!], secret identities, secret abortions, a secret disease of the hands, last-minute live-saving operations and semi-accidental murder, it's ... kind of boring ..... a solid 60% of the book is the brilliant plastic surgeon and his wife having the same unpleasant marital disputes in which the book clearly wants me to be on his side and I am really emphatically absolutely not. ( spoilers )

Both these books have now been released back into the wild; I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them. I did also read a couple of good books on my trip but those will, eventually, get their own post.

primeideal

Last year I read "The Tainted Cup," which kicks off the "Shadow of the Leviathan" series; detective Din, who's been magically modified to have a perfect memory, goes around conducting interviews for his boss Ana, who's brilliant but easily overstimulated, in an empire built on a bio-hacking arms race between humans and sea monsters. My impression of that one was that, as always, Bennett's worldbuilding is fantastic, and the mystery plot was well done. However, I wasn't as engrossed by the characters: Din was harboring a terrible secret that turned out to be neither, and Ana was completely unable to hold her tongue even in front of important people, while the "good guys bending the rules but getting away with it" versus "bad guys breaking the rules and causing problems" felt like a distinction without a difference at times.

Well, I am here to report that "A Drop of Corruption" sticks with the stuff I loved from "The Tainted Cup," while improving upon the stuff I didn't!

Din's personal issues seem more prosaic here: he's working as a civil servant to support his family, but dogged by his father's debts. Last book, he had a thing for Captain Kepheus Strovi, and this book establishes that, a year later, it was more than just a fling; Din still carries a torch for Kepheus, and in the latter's absence, has been having a lot of casual sex as an ineffective coping mechanism. (This book establishes that he enjoys unfulfilling one-night stands with women as well as men.) If anything, I think "A Drop of Corruption" glided over his reading difficulties almost too well; there are several places where Din just...reads stuff, instead of asking for help.

Ana, for her part, is as foul-mouthed as ever around Din, but is less of a nuisance around others. And one of the suspects who, if ultimately innocent of the worst of the conspiracy, was still acting outside the law, does face consequences for their actions.

This book moves the plot to Yarrow, a small monarchy northeast of Khanum. Because of its geographic location, it has great strategic value for the Imperial scientists and researchers; almost a century ago, the king signed a treaty to incorporate it into Khanum a hundred years later. So as that deadline is approaching, there's lots of political and economic integration, but Ana and Din are still technically not on the Empire's soil, which puts their investigation in a legally murky status. And I think that level of "...well, I dunno if our jurisdiction applies, but let's go with it..." makes Ana's shenanigans easier to tolerate.

We meet a new supporting character, Tira Malo, a native of Yarrow who has been modified to give her preternatural senses that help with the investigation. Malo's cynicism about the way monarchy and society work in Yarrow felt like a realistic POV.

There's some potty humor:

"My least favorite part of going out with you lot," muttered Tangis. "Not just the poor rations, but I got to wait for one of you to tell me where to piss."
"You want your prick gobbled up by a lurking turtle, then feel free to piss where you like," said Malo.
"It's been so long since my prick was gobbled by anything, ma'am," retorted Tangis, "that p'rhaps I'd not turn down a reaper-back's kiss."
Malo was so amused by this that she translated it for her fellow wardens, who whooped and chuckled huskily. It made for a strange sound: they had trained so strenuously as hunters, apparently, that they even knew how to avoid laughing aloud.

"King Lalaca has--had?--seventy-six wives in his harem, and two hundred and sixteen acknowledged children. This means he has rather a lot of heirs to choose from."
Stunned, I looked to Malo, who shrugged.
"Wherever did the fellow find the time?" I asked.
"Shut up, Din!" snapped Ana.

Spoilers for this and one of Bennett's other books:
( Read more... )

I'm not much of a horror person, and this series has lots of body horror: skin turning into leaves, leaves turning into bones, bizarre research facilities that are made of enormous plant and animal tissue. Yet, with Bennett, it almost always works for me, it's just "part of the aesthetic, let's roll with it." I was squicked by some forced drug use as applies to Din in his investigations. (Ana has her own, very idiosyncratic, methods of sensory stimulus or dampening that work for her; she sometimes enjoys overindulging in lots of food, and/or doing lots and lots of drugs, but that's her own choice.) I've seen some discussion on other people's reviews that sort of primed me to look for foreshadowing about where the series might go later, and that felt intriguing without being too much of a distraction from the main plot.

The way things ultimately resolve (or don't) with Din's feelings for Strovi wasn't really satisfying. But ultimately, it's pretty high praise that the weakest part of the book for me was the author's note at the end. I don't think it's a great look to dunk on other creative works in your own acknowledgements. And the book itself does a good job of communicating the message that "as cool as Yarrow looks to Din" (they don't have the biotech that Khanum does, so all the royal buildings are made of stone, which to Din connotes opulence) "kings aren't some divine creatures, they're just humans, and the power structures are really unjust and unfair for people like Malo." The note goes to tendentiously make the point that Did You Know Tyranny Is Bad Mkay, but like...what do you call the Empire? They don't exactly have the right to use force to unilaterally bring Yarrow under their control; are they at fault if they just leave Yarrow alone? IDK. I personally have been in the position of "aw jeez I'm just a miniscule civil servant, what am I supposed to do to fix all the problems of the world," so I could sympathize with Din, but the note felt tacked-on. Overall, though, this is a fun puzzle, and a fast and engrossing read!

(This has nothing to do with the book itself but I loved the cover art on the hardcover edition. Blue flowers, and silver leaves growing out of a hand. Silhouettes of people in the corner--I think Ana in her robes, Din in a conical hat, Malo with her bow, and who's the fourth figure with the spear? Thelenai???)

P. S. The book has a one page "the story so far" at the beginning, so if you want to skip "Tainted Cup" and jump in here, you can do that too!

Bingo: This series is a perfect fit for the Biopunk square. Could also count for A Book In Parts, Published in 2025, LGBTQIA protagonist.

genarti

I posted a while ago about how I'd been really getting into pottery this year. That remains true, and shows no signs of stopping. It's just so fun! I still take a 3-hour class once a week at a member-owned studio near me; I think wistfully about spending more time on it too, but for various reasons including but not limited to the busyness of my life in general, that dedicated weekly slot is what works right now.

Back in late February, I spotted a flyer that someone had hung up on the studio bulletin board. It was a call for Boston-area artists to submit art inspired by Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, as part of an art show and book circle event co-organized by two local stores, The Local Hand and JustBook-ish.

I'd been meaning to read Parable of the Sower for ages, and the idea of doing a pottery piece inspired by a book seemed really fun -- like a Yuletide prompt, but for physical objects. Also, if your piece was accepted, you got a $500 stipend and 75% of the sale price if your piece sold, and let's be real, that was also extremely motivating.

And motivation was useful! Because the deadline was just over a month away. Pottery has a lot of built-in wait time while things dry, get fired, etc, so on a once-a-week schedule that was going to be pretty tight.

So I read the book, and loved it -- I'd been told that it was brilliant, which it is, and that it's brutal, which it is, but all of the (accurate!) discussions of its brutality hadn't conveyed the fierce pragmatism and focus of how Butler writes hope and community, and that's what I loved most -- and by the next week, I had a plan.

( About my piece, and the process, and also noodling about pottery and art -- this got very long )

skygiants

When I'm reading nonfiction, there's often a fine line for me between 'you, the author, are getting yourself all up in this narrative and I wish you'd get out of the way' and 'you, the author, have a clearly presented point of view and it makes it easy and fun to fight with you about your topic; pray continue.' Happily, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages falls squarely in the latter category for me. She's telling me a bunch of fascinating gossip and I do often disagree with her about what it all means but we're having such a good time arguing about it!

Rose starts out her book by explaining that she's interested in the idea of 'marriage' both as a narrative construct developed by the partners within it -- "a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent" -- and a negotiation of power, vulnerable to exploitation. She also says that she wanted to find a good balance of happy and unhappy Victorian marriages as case studies to explore, but then she got so fascinated by several of the unhappy ones that things got a little out of balance .... and she is right! Her case studies are fascinating, and at least one of them (the one she clearly sees as the happiest) is not technically a marriage at all (which, of course, is part of her point.)

The couples in question are:

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Baillie Carlyle -- the framing device for the whole book, because even though this marriage is not her favorite marriage Jane Carlyle is her favorite character. Notable for the fact that Jane Carlyle wrote a secret diary through her years of marriage detailing how unhappy she was, which was given to Carlyle after her death, making him feel incredibly guilty, and then published after his death, making everyone else feel like he ought to have been feeling incredibly guilty. Rose considers the secret postmortem diary gift a brilliant stroke of Jane's in Triumphantly Taking Control Of The Narrative Of Their Marriage.

John Ruskin and Effie Gray -- like every possible Victorian drama happened to this marriage. non-consummation! parent drama! art drama! accusations that Ruskin was trying to manipulate Effie Gray into a ruinous affair so that he could divorce her! Effie Gray's family coming down secretly to sneak her away so she could launch a big divorce case instead! my favorite element of this whole story is that the third man in the Art Love Triangle, John Millais, was painting Ruskin's portrait when he and Gray fell in love instead, and Ruskin insisted on making Millais keep painting his portrait for numerous awkward sittings while the divorce proceedings played themselves out and [according to Rose] was genuinely startled that Millais was not interested in subsequently continuing their pleasant correspondence.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor -- this was my favorite section; I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy. Harriet Taylor was married to John Taylor but was not enjoying the experience, began a passionate intellectual correspondence with John Stuart Mill who believed as strongly as she did in women's rights etc., they seriously considered the ethics around running off together but decided that while all three of them (Harriet Taylor, John Taylor, and John Mill) were made moderately unhappy by the current situation of "John Mill comes over three nights a week for passionate intellectual discussions with Harriet Taylor while John Taylor considerately goes Out for Several Hours", nobody was made as miserable by it as John Taylor would be if Harriet left John Taylor and therefore ethics demanded that the situation remain as it was. (Meanwhile the Carlyles, who were friends of John Mill, nicknamed Harriet 'Platonica,' which I have to admit is a very funny move if you are a bitchy 19th century intellectual and you hate the married woman your friend is having a passionate but celibate philosophical romance of the soul with.) Eventually John Taylor did die and Harriet Taylor and John Mill did get married -- platonically or otherwise is unknown but regardless they seem to have been blissfully happy. Rose thinks that Harriet Taylor was probably not as brilliant as John Mill thought and John Mill was henpecked, but happily so, because letting his wife tell him what to do soothed his patriarchal guilt. I think that Rose is a killjoy. Let a genius think his partner of the soul is also a genius if he wants to! I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong!

Charles Dickens and Catherine Dickens -- oh this was a Bad Marriage and everyone knows it. Unlike all the other women in this book, Catherine Dickens did not really command a narrative space of her own except Cast Aside Wife which -- although that's probably part of Rose's point -- makes this section IMO weaker and a bit less fun than the others.

George Eliot and George Henry Lewes -- Rose's favorite! She thinks these guys are very romantic and who can blame her, though she does want to take time to argue with people who think that George Eliot's genius relied more on George Henry Lewes kindling the flame than it did on George Eliot herself. It not being 1983 anymore, it did not occur to me that 'George Eliot was not primarily responsible for George Eliot' was an argument that needed to be made. "Maybe marriage is better when it doesn't have to actually be marriage" is clearly a point she's excited to make, given which one does wonder why she doesn't pull any Victorian long-term same-sex partnerships into her thematic examination. And the answer, probably, is 'I'm interested in specifically in the narrative of heterosexual marriage and heterosexual power dynamics and the ways they still leave an imprint on our contemporary moment,' which is fair, but if you're already exploring a thing by looking outside it .... well, anyway. I just looked up her bibliography out of curiosity to see if she ever did write about gay people and the answer is "well, she's got a book about Josephine Baker" so I may well be looking that up in future so I can have fun arguing with Rose some more!

flo_nelja

19 juin : Grain de beauté et réincarnation
She wasn't a guy, Aya/Mitsuki, G
Donner des idées sur AO3

20 juin : Objet queercodé
Le grand blond avec une chaussure noire, Toulouse/Perrach, PG
L'art révélateur sur AO3

21 juin : « Good Luck Babe ! »
La reine des neiges, Petite fille de brigands -> Gerda, PG
D'hypocrites souhaits de bonheur sur AO3

primeideal

This book is 537 pages long. And I think it could have been shorter. Or longer! But it's trying to do a couple different things, and the combination of them didn't really come together for me.

Premise: Elliot Schafer is a genre-savvy thirteen-year-old from our world. His teacher takes him to a wall that only a few special people can see. If he climbs up and over it, he'll enter a magical land. He knows what portal fantasies are and figures "sure, no one will miss me on this end, might as well try." This all happens within the first ten pages.

Besides humans, there are a lot of different types of beings who live in the Borderlands: elves, dwarves, mermaids, harpies, etc. The teenagers who come to the border camp are in training to defend the realm, either (mostly) as warriors or (less often) as diplomats and treaty-wranglers. Elliot, a modern British teenager who understands things like cell phones and Pink Floyd, is horrified at the concept of war, and wants to become a diplomat. Unfortunately, the warriors are increasingly crowding out the diplomats, and peace is becoming less and less prestigious.

Even more unfortunately, we're seeing everything through the POV of Elliot, who has been neglected by his parents, hasn't made friends in the mundane world, and takes it out on everyone else by being as sardonic and cutting as possible at all times. He defaults to assuming none of the jocks could be as smart as he is, and quickly decides to address the attractive, athletic, popular Luke Sunborn as "loser," while also making fun of Luke for mispronouncing words. (You know who mispronounces words? People who learned big words from reading books and might be too shy to use them in conversation frequently.)

He also, early on, meets the elf girl Serene (Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle), and decides that she's his one true love, the breeze in his sky, the sparks of his fire, the jewel in his tiara, and on and on and on. Elf culture's sexist stereotypes are the reverse of the human world: women are pigeonholed as being the strong warriors who just can't control themselves, and men as the delicate emotional nurturers whose virtue must be protected from scoundrel women. So there are lots of conversations where Serene is like "oh, Elliot's just a gentle flower, I can't be taking advantage of him," and Elliot is like "this is kind of messed up! Also human stereotypes are messed up! Everyone's messed up!" And, okay. We get it.

Because the book is so purposefully genre-savvy, we get the sense that things with Serene are not going to go as smoothly as Elliot hopes, there's a love triangle that's going to be subverted in the tropiest way possible. But not before a lot, a lot, of adolescent romance and miscommunication and awkwardness. (And a lot more fifteen-year-olds having sex than I think is particularly representative of this generation.) This was the part where it was like...this could be a lot shorter because I can already sense where it's going, I see the trope beats, I'm not actually interested in teenage romance as an end in itself.

On the other hand, the premise of "everybody is obsessed with war, and that's kind of a problem, what this land actually needs is peace, and modern technology that works" could have been more intriguing to me. At one point Elliot theorizes:

“Has it ever occurred to you all that the books about magical worlds in our world might be lures? Shiny toys dangled in front of children so we go ooooh, mermaids, oooh, unicorns, oooh, harpies—”

Like, if the book had entirely leaned into that premise, people in portal-fantasy world trying to advertise portal fantasies as being more fun than they actually are, that could have been very funny and also very meta. I'm not a fan of the "oh, in books it's like this, but this is the real world, it can't be that easy" trope--and "In Other Lands" does that a lot. Critically, there is no actual magic at the magic school--it's just that a few people from our world can see the Borderlands, and most can't.

Contrast this with something like Harry Potter, which is probably the best-known example of the "kid from our world goes to fantasy world, it's neat, but also why are these children in mortal danger all the time, where are the adults" tropes that this seems to be trying to subvert. Hogwarts is whimsical! Hogwarts has owls delivering mail, enchanted hats singing songs, touchy ghosts, touchy chess pieces, talking portraits, moving staircases...these things are fun, and magical. (It also has Quidditch, but I understand that Quidditch, while delightfully whimsical, doesn't necessarily make a great deal of sense as a sport to people who like thinking about and analyzing sports. "In Other Lands" has Trigon, which is a game played by throwing a glass ball around. Since Elliot is so steadfastly intellectual that he finds watching or caring about sports utterly beneath him, we never have to have an actual explanation of the rules.) It feels like Elliot, or the author, is trying to deconstruct this setting without having a clear sense of what makes it appealing to begin with. From this vantage, I wouldn't have minded if the book was longer--if there were actually enjoyable things about this world, then the earnest contrast of "okay, but my world has technology that lets you play music, and pencils and pencil sharpeners, and also teenagers are not learning how to stab each other with swords," might have been less ham-fisted.

Elliot realizes that the warriors need him for missions so he can look for diplomatic solutions, but he's not really good at making friends, so it's basically a case of haranguing the authority figures until he wears them down and they agree to bring him along. He's definitely not the chosen one or the one who has it easy, but there's this sense of "oh well, the rules don't apply to me" main character syndrome that gets a little exhausting in combination with his overall misanthropy.

There are some genuinely funny moments:

Elliot was trying to teach himself trollish via a two-hundred-year-old book by a man who’d had a traumatic break-up with a troll. This meant a lot of commentary along the lines of “This is how trolls say I love you. FOOTNOTE: BUT THEY DON’T MEAN IT!”

But also descriptions that come directly from TVTropes:

Elliot did not know why the two most important women in his life had to be deadpan snarkers.

Side note: I read this right after "The Winged Histories," which is extremely different in its prose style. However, I was amused by the coincidence that not only do they both have the same publisher (Small Beer Press), but also, the last section of each book has a similar reveal about the POV character's endgame love interest.

Bingo: A Book In Parts, previous Readalong, Small Press, Elves and Dwarves (I expect to use it for this), LGBTQIA protagonist, Stranger in a Strange Land.

flo_nelja

16 juin : La première représentation d’une personne queer
Goodbye my Rose Garden, Alice Douglas, G
Traduction, trahison sur AO3

17 juin : Blasphème
Bible, Jesus/Judas, M
N'était-ce que cela ? sur AO3

18 juin : Renouer avec la religion
Conclave, Lawrence, PG, avertissement pour homophobie religieuse
Seul dans une foule sur AO3

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Quatrevingt-treize Reading Club

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Fic - Just-unrequited - Gravity Falls - Bill/Ford

Drabbles mois des fiertés, partie 8

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(SFF Bingo): A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

That art show thing I mentioned last post

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Drabbles mois des fiertés, partie 7

(SFF Bingo): In Other Lands, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Drabbles mois des fiertés, partie 6

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July 2014

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