Bookpost: Worlds, Bits, Stars, Jacks

[roadrunnertwice]

I've got a pile of reviews in the hopper from the past year or so, so I'm kind of shuffling the chronology to come up with nice "optimum handful of trail mix" posts. Anyway, here's a book I just finished plus a few things from last year.

Alaya Dawn Johnson — The Library of Broken Worlds

June 7, 2024

Holy shit this was good. I got it from the library after watching Ruth’s reactions to it in real time, and was not disappointed.

This book seems to be packaged as romantic YA SF. Don’t fucking believe it! Much in the spirit of the book’s own themes and preoccupations, that is a kernel of truth fueling a massive misdirection. This is psychedelic SF of the highest intellectual potency. Ruth said it reminded her of a mix of the Locked Tomb books and the good parts of Garth Nix’s Lirael. I’d also compare it to Jeff Noon’s Virt, Slone Leong’s Prism Stalker, and maybe that last part of Kalpa Imperial where time finally collapses entirely and it turns into the Iliad but with everyone’s face replaced by tenth-generation photocopied glamor shots of early 20th century Hollywood stars.

It’s an exciting story with superb momentum, but it also demands some significant work to keep up with the action — you are expected to continually devise and test your own explanations for things that are deliberately left underexplained, which feels a bit like sprinting at 40mph to keep up with a car so you can carry on a conversation through the rolled-down window. I found it very rewarding!

...This one time, at a reading we attended, Kelly Link was asked to define the “young adult” “genre” within the artistic domain of genre traits (as opposed to the strictly commercial domain of market segmentation). Her answer was that a YA story absolutely must be about a person doing something (probably several things) for the first time. That’s pretty squiggly and porous, but I feel like it does actually get to the core of something useful. If you stand there and squint, then yeah, The Library of Broken Worlds' core thematic and emotional concerns absolutely situate it in YA. It's just that the reading experience is wildly perpendicular to what you'd expect if you went out looking for some YA to read. For a fun illustration of this, go check out the wave of confused and dismayed reviews on the book's Goodreads page.

Amaduyu Tatsuki, Mitsumi Misato, Wakaki Tamiki — 16-bit Sensation (comics)

Nov 24, 2023

A fun little fictionalized memoir about... makin' porno video games in 1990s Japan.

What I thought was most interesting about this was its focus on the texture of the period technology. Honestly I learned a lot about the pre-Windows Japanese PC ecosystem (like, the pc98 and friends), both from the text and from the bit of research I did after it piqued my curiosity.

Laurie J. Marks — Dancing Jack

July 18, 2023

An earlier work by the author of the Elemental Logic series. (1993, and only recently back (?) in print as an ebook.) I greatly enjoyed this.

You can see some of Elemental Logic’s preoccupations making themselves known ahead of time here: squirrelly and symbolic magics, the flash of insight as story-derailing superweapon, curses inflicted by an alliance of your enemies and your inner doubts, redemptions and second acts, bein’ generally just gay as hell.

There's a particular spell in the story woven around the titular dancing jack, and its nature is acknowledged but never explicitly identified. I had some kind of summary of it in my head soon after reading this, developed as I was backpacking, and I neglected to write it down. But I think it had something to do with cutting you free from the illusory obligations of sunk costs and self-image, or inflicting a knowledge of how wide a range of choices you actually still have. Nightmare-tier power level tbh. Just imagine.

Bonus Level: Sea of Stars

Oct. something, 2023

I loved the traversal and combat and aesthetics in this game, but the story and character writing left me cold. The heroes were just too abstract, you know? I played both demos and had high hopes, because in that short format they gave off a vibe of two people who've known each other for a really long time and who get along really well and support each other, and I feel like that's a dynamic that's underexplored in RPGs. But they didn't turn out to have a whole lot in the way of preferences or inner life, alas. Same for most of the rest of the cast.

Well: okay, actually there's one bit of character writing I really liked —

(END GAME SPOILERS AHEAD.)

— it's Resh'an's codependent and complicit relationship with the big bad. He may act sympathetic to others and go out of his way to be helpful, but when the rubber finally hits the road, his top priority is his shitty abuser friend, and he's gonna choose him over you every single time. I thought that was more real and raw than anything else in the entire game.