Books: Stranger, some Borges, two Wells

Martha Wells — Stories of the Raksura vol. 1

Feb 13

Yay, more Raksura funtimes!

Okay, these novellas don't really stand alone, and are basically deep cuts / fanservice for people who dug the three Raksura novels. But that's me, so... cool. By the way, have I mentioned you should totally read The Cloud Roads?

José Luis Borges — several stories, including Tlön, Pierre Menard, and Forking Paths

Feb 7

I'd forgotten how creepy "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" actually is. Especially this time, when I realized that the character who kicks off the story about a parasitic fictional world subsuming the real one is Adolfo Bioy Casares. ???!!!!!!!

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith — Stranger

Jan 27

Isaac and I have this ongoing conversation about apocalypticism and post-apocalypticism in fiction. I'm usually wary and kind of grumpy about it, and he loves it and thought I was being ridiculous, so we had to go around the table a few times until I could explain that allergy coherently.

Isaac's points are all legit: stakes are important in adventure stories, and a hostile environment is a solid way to raise the stakes. The memories of a world in collapse offer interesting perspective on the pre-collapse world, revealing its underlying bizarreness in ways that a contemporary setting can't. Stuff like that. I love that shit too! But there are basically two reasons I'm always initially leery about post-apocalyptic stories.

First, it's the vehicle of choice for annoying gun fantasies. Society collapsed so NOW, FINALLY, we can have an Important Story about Armed Men, who were totally right about human nature! Don't want. (I'm not even gonna say this is the most common failure state of the genre, just that it takes up enough space that I start out skeptical.)

Second: this is a bit more nebulous, but I think the more complete a fictional dystopia is, the more likely I am to find a sermon instead of a story. In this, I think hyper-regimented control societies (very popular in YA and middle grade since the '90s at least) and 100% anarchic post-apocalypses are two sides of the same coin. These worlds have a tendency to be badly, cartoonishly incomplete, because their inhabitants have to act really unnaturally to maintain them in the required state.

I guess both of those point in the same direction: I demand that any post-apocalyptic world have a lot of interesting stuff to do for people who aren't badass warriors roaming the wastes. Like, you can still have all the main characters be down for wasteland funtimes! But the setting needs to include regular people doing what regular people do — banding together, building stuff, worrying about trivialities, having feuds, having ambitions, fucking up.

You must presuppose that the lives of people doing something other than shoot motherfuckers are interesting and have value.

Uh, anyway! Stranger passes that test with flying colors. The walled town of Las Anclas was an awesome setting, I liked the ensemble cast and their multitude of conflicting ambitions, King Voske's empire-building made an excellent threat, and I will totally read the sequel.

Martha Wells — The Wheel of the Infinite (re-read)

Mar 1

I'd forgotten most of what happened in this one, and I ran across the ebook while copying everything to my kindle, so I gave it a quick re-read.

I’d forgotten how weird the denouement was! I was remembering it as a plot I've seen before from Wells (undead spirits from another world ruin everything), and it definitely starts going there, but then it takes a hard left turn into a problem arguably even worse than vampires from the ghost dimension? Rad.